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go-events · 5 years ago

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GO Rom Com Spotlight: @epi-vet

The most excellent @epi-vet (also Epivet on AO3 and epivet on Spotify) has claimed Persuasion to adapt for Good Omens in the Good Omens Rom Com Event.

For reference, here’s a little background about the source material!

About Persuasion: Eight years ago, Anne Elliot rejected Frederick Wentworth, the man she loved, out of a sense of duty and obedience. Now an ignored and faded spinster, she follows her financially stricken family from their home, only to be reintroduced to the now successful and wealthy Captain Frederick Wentworth. With their roles reversed and Captain Wentworth the eligible and wealthy bachelor, Anne navigates the scheming society that still tries to keep them apart.

We spent some time chatting about how the adaptation is coming so far, as well as future plans for it! Now, get to know @epi-vet a little better!

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goromcom: You know how if you open a Tumblr chat with someone you haven't chatted to before, Tumblr tells you two things they post about? I wanted to tell you that yours reports that you post "about #geeky data and #good omens". I can appreciate someone with an affinity for geeky data. Can you share any sort of interesting geeky data with us?

epi-vet: #Geeky data is fun, but my favorite homegrown tag is #QuantifiedFandom. In the real world, I work with a lot of data for modeling and prediction. I liked the idea of using those skills to understand the fandom better by looking at the data crumbs around it. Right after I saw the show, I was intrigued by how quickly Good Omens playlists multiplied on Spotify. Then I did what any totally health sane person would do. I downloaded 300 Good Omens themed playlists and started crunching numbers. Throughout the summer and fall, more and more playlists were popping up. I did a second pretty exhaustive pull of 1400 playlists in December. I analyzed the most common songs, length of playlists, artists, differences between playlist themes (Ineffable Husbands versus Demon Crowley), and more. Two of the top four songs weren’t even in the show (#1 Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy and #4 From Eden). Bob Dylan’s You Angel You is the most underappreciated Ineffable Husbands song. “You angel, you; You got me under your wing...” Really. Google the lyrics, we’ll wait.

I’m epivet on Spotify where you can find the top 100 songs from Good Omens-themed playlists, the top 50 Ineffable Husbands songs, and my own scene by scene playlist with links to a Google doc explaining each selection and identifying key lyrics because, again, totally healthy sane person here. I’m also running the GORomCom discord-created playlists as well.

goromcom: And I listen to those playlists a lot! Thank you! But on to your rom com! You chose to adapt Persuasion. Has this story been a favorite of yours, or is there some other reason you chose it?

epi-vet: I’m a longtime Jane Austen fan. I love how she pokes at the constraints and absurdities of her time. Persuasion is my favorite because the characters are more mature, more human. Anne breaks off her engagement with Wentworth, and while she regrets how things have turned out 7 years later, she also can still see the reasonableness of her choice. The story has one villain and some unsavory characters, but many of the characters are complicated people who make the best decisions they can (except for Anne’s father who is ridiculous).

The 1995 movie is infinitely better than the 2007 one; I will brook no argument.

goromcom: I wouldn’t dare! :) What's your favorite moment of the story, and are you looking forward to presenting it in your adaptation? Any loose plans for that scene that you can share?

epi-vet: Wentworth’s letter to Anne in the dramatic climax: You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. *swoon*

I’m still working that scene out, so I’ll instead share some fun I’m having making poor Gabriel my comic relief. The book opens with the Anne’s father reading his own entry in the Baronetage. His rank defines him, so reading a Who’s Who provides him the reassurance he needs. Gabriel begins my RomCom loudly reading his visitation of Mary, especially loving the “Fear not, Mary” line. He soon after complains to Michael “[the humans] don’t even cower before us. Really, when was the last time we had to say, ‘Be not afraid?’” He also serves as my Lady Dalrymple in the Italian concert scene from the 1995 movie. Aziraphale is trying to keep Crowley from leaving (due to genre typical misunderstandings), and Sandalphon is pulling him back saying Gabriel needs him to explain the buffet – he’s worried he’ll Fall if he eats shellfish.

goromcom: Oh goodness, so many angel/demon shenanigans. I can’t wait. Other than those details, do you plan to stick very closely to the beats of the original story, or make bigger changes?

epi-vet: I think one of the best Jane Austen adaptations ever is Clueless. When we watch a period drama, we view everything through a buffer of temporal distance. Everything is slightly foreign, and it can soften the impact that a contemporary reader would have felt. I suspect viewers of Clueless, in some ways, have an experience much closer to Jane Austen’s readers’ experience of Emma.

I’m taking the plot of Persuasion and applying it as closely as I can to our characters from the moment the tv show ends. I did lots of character mapping and tried to stay true to the heart of the work, like Amy Heckerling did to Emma in Clueless. I did end up with one original character because I just couldn’t figure out how to work the plot with only Good Omen canon characters.

goromcom: I’m actually a big fan of Clueless as an Austen adaptation too, so I like where you’re going with this.

Let me see if I can get one more tidbit out of you before I stop! What's an interesting decision you've made in your planning so far--a notable casting decision, a changing of venue, or some other plan you have to paint Good Omens all over your rom com?

epi-vet: Since I’m writing it as post canon in the Good Omens universe rather than putting Aziraphale and Crowley into Regency Britain, I get off easy there. I am trying to take a lot of the dialog between Aziraphale and Crowley from the show and flip it. So Aziraphale is the one who needs to do something or Crowley will never speak to him again. Aziraphale is unforgiveable. Also, I’m including some nods to the Good Omens book. Crowley takes the properly demonic activity of gluing coins to the sidewalk into the tech age with an app. It, of course, backfires spectacularly. I also have a hopefully charming and funny Golden Girls reference.

goromcom: Always down for a Golden Girls reference. Rose is my homegirl. But let’s leave some things undiscovered until your story debuts, and move on to the final question. I am blatantly stealing this last question from The Good Place: The Podcast, but here goes: Tell me something "good". It can be something big or small. It can be a charity you think is doing good work, or you can talk about how great your pet is.

epi-vet: RIPMedicalDebt. For pennies on the dollar, you can wipe out someone’s medical debt. For everyone outside the US, this is a completely bizarre concept, but it’s a big deal in the US. Medical debt happens when you lack health insurance or have limited health insurance. You didn’t charge too much on your credit card. You didn’t buy a house you can’t afford. Something happened to your health, you sought the care you needed, and you are now destitute. These debts don’t get paid back often so they get bundled and sold to various institutions. RIPMedicalDebt buys those debts cheaply and then forgives the balances owed. Individuals, community organizations, churches, and other groups have used them to do immense good.

goromcom: So important, and I had no idea this existed. Thank you for sharing it with us.

And also, thank you for sharing details of your upcoming GO adaptation of Persuasion, coming very soon now!

#goromcom #goromcom spotlight #good omens #epi-vet #persuasion

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letterboxd · 4 years ago

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Life in Film: Kris Rey.

As her new comedy I Used to Go Here opens, Chicago-based writer and director Kris Rey talks to Letterboxd editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood about turning 40, divorce, female friendships, why nobody but Jemaine Clement could pull off a scene making tea, and what we can all learn from Generation Z.

If Kris Rey’s new comedy I Used to Go Here were a typical Hollywood rom-com, it would finish just before Rey’s film starts: with Kate Conklin (Gillian Jacobs) as a newly published author, engaged to be married to a handsome guy. Instead, we meet Kate in a Bushwick apartment she can no longer afford, as her publishing company breaks the news that her debut novel (Seasons Passed; terrible cover art, purple prose) is a failure and the publicity tour is off. That’s on top of the insult that her fiancé has recently ended their engagement.

Kate is given a faint ray of optimism when her creative writing professor (Jemaine Clement) invites her back to the liberal arts college she graduated from a decade earlier, to give a talk to his Gen Z students. Leaving Brooklyn and her pregnant bestie behind, Kate dives into the nostalgia of her old Illinois stomping ground, and I Used to Go Here turns into a low-key, pot-fuelled, intergenerational romp through ideas of success, friendship, creativity, authenticity and idolization.

The film’s fans on Letterboxd include Matt Neglia, who writes: “Gillian Jacobs brings charismatic charm and restraint to her role as a writer longing for a time when we were filled with endless potential without the fear of failure.” Matt DeTurck identifies with this theme: “Relatable for anyone wrestling with fitting the pieces of their life together in ways that feel truthful.”

On the contemporary representation of university life, Alex Billington remarks that “it’s got all the college movie tropes… but it repackages all of these in a smart adult-looking-back indie film package”. Max notes that “the college kids are an invaluable addition and feel like people rather than college or Gen Z stereotypes”.

Kate (Gillian Jacobs) and David (Jemaine Clement) in a scene from ‘I Used to Go Here’.

Your film starts just after the point at which a mainstream comedy about a single white woman in her thirties would end: with Kate’s book being published to no acclaim, her engagement being broken off, everybody else pregnant except her. It runs in opposition to the happy endings Hollywood has made us expect. Kris Rey: Oh god, [that’s] so astute. No-one has said that before and I have never thought of it before, but that’s so true! I think what’s so interesting about the whole journey that she goes on, and all of our own personal journeys, is that you’re used to, like, at the end of the movie, they get married! She gets her book published! And then everything is perfect! And then you realize: ‘Oh. Oh god, okay. How do I move on from this?’ So, you’re right, that is what’s so different about this.

The other thing—and I’m sure this can be said about most films this year—is how the set-up feels weirdly right for these times, which is to say: the widespread derailment of plans that the pandemic has wrought. It’s like we’re in a strange global coming-of-age. Several Letterboxd reviews observe how, for women in their late twenties to early thirties, there’s a second coming-of-age where everything suddenly feels extremely nostalgic. The film dives into that longing feeling by literally returning Kate to her old college. It’s funny, you know, a lot of people have pointed out how this doesn’t quite fit into a category. It’s not a rom-com, it’s not a true coming-of-age film in a sense of what we know that to be. I think that part of it is exactly what you’ve just pointed out, which is that it’s about a unique period of time for women, where you do reach this precipice. Mostly, it comes out of this big ever-pressing question which is “Am I going to have a family or not?”. Not every woman, but most women, have that question in their head until they either have a baby or they reach the age where they can’t have a baby anymore. “Am I going to have this? Am I going to follow this path of domesticity? Am I going to find a relationship that works long enough to have a family with them? Am I going to have to make sacrifices in my career to make room to have a family? Am I going to find them all at once?” Men just don’t have that point, to no fault of their own, but the fault of the patriarchy in general, which is that it has to be a conscious decision for women in a way that everything revolves around that, as we go about our lives at that age.

And you’ve explored that idea in more than just this film. I loved the awkward-yet-sincere moment at the baby shower, when the friends make her hold her book alongside their third-trimester bumps for a group photo. A book is a baby, and its publication should also be celebrated! Scenes like that emphasize how well Gillian Jacobs embraced the role of Kate. What did she bring to it that wasn’t on the page? There’s such a special thing that happens when you cast anyone for anything. It certainly happened with Gillian, but also with everyone. Definitely Jemaine was a big one, which is that I don’t typically write for specific actors. I write a character, I write the dialog, and then when I cast them I think ‘oh, Jemaine Clement is going to be in this role’, so then I go back through and read the whole thing in his voice and think ‘maybe he’d say it like this instead’ and maybe after [a scene we don’t wish to spoil], he would make tea for everyone. Very few, if any, American actors would be able to pull that moment off. That is kind of what I’m looking for: who are they? Are they able to feel like real people? Because so often they feel performative.

Like versions of a person. Right. Like they’re acting like a person! Gillian is very authentic. If you were to talk to her, she would just seem like her real self, and that was what was so appealing about her for me. Gillian just really brought herself, and I learned about her as a person.

As well as great comics like Kate Micucci and Jorma Taccone, there’s a lovely assortment of inclusive young characters who live in Kate’s old student house. Where did you find them? I just flushed them out and gathered them and held them close! There’s a couple of them that I didn’t know but I had seen in other stuff. Josh Wiggins, who plays Hugo, I’d seen him act in a movie called Hellion. Forrest Goodluck I saw in The Miseducation of Cameron Post. He’s incredible in that and I knew I wanted him to play Animal. Hannah Marks was someone that was sent to me, and we talked on the phone and I just knew she would be perfect. She’s such a brilliant go-getter and filmmaker and so ambitious in her own life. Khloe Janel, who plays Emma, auditioned for me here in Chicago and she’s so good. I adore her. I was taking a walk yesterday through the neighborhood and I saw her name on a little sign—she was making these poetry zines! I bought one.

Hugo (Josh Wiggins), Animal (Forrest Goodluck) and Tall Brandon (Brandon Daley) in ‘I Used to Go Here’.

The person we need to know about is whoever the guy is who plays Tall Brandon! Brandon Daley, who plays tall Brandon, is a person that I just knew. He is on the periphery of my social circle and he had come to a few parties at my house. His buddies called him ‘Tall Brandon’, in this very demeaning way! They were of course all good friends. I thought he was such a funny character that I wrote the character based on him. But I didn’t know him. Then he heard that I had written a part called Tall Brandon and he asked if he could play the part. I was like, “I don’t think so, Brandon!”

Was he an actor? Kind of. He’s a filmmaker but he’s much younger than me and he hadn’t done anything besides his own work. But I made him audition for the role based on him! [Laughs] I don’t know, I was just like, it’s a huge role, you know? The last thing you want is someone who can’t act like themselves, which everyone struggles to do. Anyway, he was so good in the audition, so funny, and he just nailed it. He steals the whole movie! He’s just so good.

I Used to Go Here is a long way from problematic college fare like Revenge of the Nerds or the angst of St Elmo’s Fire. It feels thoroughly 21st-century, especially in how the Gen Z housemates take an inclusive, ‘sure, why not’ approach to having Kate tag along with them. What inspired the way you wrote the intergenerational aspects of the film? There weren’t necessarily college films that I was using for inspiration. I wanted the place to feel the same that she left, but I wanted the people to feel different. This is what I’m finding in my life. I’m gonna turn 40 this year, and when I interact with people in their twenties, I’m blown away by the way that they view the world and the way that they view themselves and each other. I’m so impressed by it. And I am on board with a lot of these cultural changes that we’re seeing happen before our eyes, like, the idea of gender identity has changed so much, and so quickly. I’ve never seen anything change like that in my life. The idea of consent. When I first heard it I was like, “What? You have to ask if you wanna touch someone or kiss someone? It seems so lame!” Now, I can’t believe that we ever did that! I’m learning so much. They seem so clear-headed about it all. I just think that we have a lot to learn from that generation.

The movie’s not about that, necessarily, but it’s infused into it and I wanted that to influence Kate, in her life. Some of it is specific to this generation, but some of it is also just specific to being in your twenties. The character April, the way that she thinks about the [publishing] industry and her art, and the way that Kate, who is jaded, is like, “Okay, whatever, you’re naïve, make your little magazine, but you’ll have to follow the rules.” We’ve all been faced with that before.

Kris Rey with her son Jude Swanberg on the set of ‘I Used to Go Here’. / Photo by Blair Todd

So it’s a watershed year for you, turning 40. What would you define success and happiness as now, compared to when you were in your twenties and the ideas you had about the industry then? Oh, god. Okay so I’ve also had a lot of personal growth because I got divorced this last year, which was crazy. I’ve got two kids, a four year old and a nine year old. So I’ve been through so much; it’s been such a huge change for me. I have learned a lot, but one of the things that I have learned so much is that the relationships that matter the most in my life are my female friendships. I’ve always known that, but I’ve never seen it so much as I have in the last two years, both personally throughout my divorce, and professionally through making a film without a romantic partner to lean on. Of course I have male friends that are wonderful and supportive, but my female friends, those relationships are where I’m realizing I wanna put my effort into more than any other part of my life.

Okay, it’s time for a few questions about movies that are important to you. Thinking back, what is the film that made you want to be a filmmaker? Boogie Nights was the first film that I watched when I was in high school that I thought ‘oh, this is a job, and I’m seeing someone make stylistic choices that are interesting and unique’. You can see the behind the scenes in that movie a little bit. I remember watching it and thinking ‘that would be a cool job’. I also really loved the movie Bottle Rocket in high school. I began my filmmaking career thinking that I wanted to make documentaries, and so there’s also a lot of docs that I loved. But those were the early films that made me realize that it was even a job. Unfortunately not any female filmmakers, because I think that was just so rare [then].

What is your all-time comfort favorite film? Sleepless in Seattle, no question.

There’s your female filmmaker! Yes, but with a movie like Sleepless in Seattle, it’s such a mainstream movie that I never thought of it as ��a job’. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I saw more independent and auteurish works. But Nora Ephron is a genius. That movie is perfect in my opinion.

What’s a film that, as a teenager, felt like a mirror into your soul? That movie with Chris O’Donnell, an Irish film, Circle of Friends. With Minnie Driver! Who is also in Good Will Hunting, another film I saw in high school. I haven’t seen Circle of Friends since it came out, but it felt very real to me, that movie. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that movie to anyone!

Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in ‘Shakespeare in Love’ (1998).

What is the sexiest film you’ve ever seen? Shakespeare in Love! [Laughs.] There’s two movies. One was Legends of the Fall. It was literally the sexiest movie I’d ever seen up till that point. I was very young when it came out and there was this lovemaking scene by candlelight and I was like, ‘oh, that’s what sex is!’. And then Shakespeare in Love. That scene where he’s unwrapping her? So hot.

Who is another director you’d die for? I’m such a huge fan of Nicole Holofcener. I love her films so much. I have never met her. I do know some people that know her and I am honestly so scared to meet her because I like her work so much. She’s probably my favorite filmmaker. I just vibe with everything she makes. I love the tone. I just love all of her movies.

What’s a film that we should watch after we watch yours? You should watch She Dies Tomorrow. It’s so good, and Amy Seimetz is my very, very close and dear friend. We started making movies at the same time. Our movies were supposed to premiere at SXSW on the same day, and now they are being released on the same day, and we’re just in love with each other. Amy and I are— the movies are so wildly different from each other, but her movie is so good. It is really funny, it’s really weird and it’s really appropriate for the times right now.

I feel like some reviews are missing the comedy in it. I laughed so much throughout that film. I agree: people don’t get it! Can I shout out another movie that I watched recently? Crossing Delancey. I had never seen it before and my sister-in-law texted me and she was like, “you should watch this film like right now—this seems like something you would love”. I couldn’t believe how good it was. It’s so great. It feels like it could be shot right now in Brooklyn. All the cool kids in Brooklyn are dressing exactly the same way that all the cool kids in Brooklyn dressed in 1988, or whenever it came out. She’s having a dialog with a friend and the friend is like openly breastfeeding. And the way that they’re talking about romance and all this stuff is so on point. That movie’s great.

And another female director! Joan Micklin Silver. Yeah!

Related content

Dana Danger’s chronological list of films directed by women

Appropriate Behavior: the Letterboxd Showdown of indie, slacker and mumblecore films

Quarter Life Crisis: a list by Mary, and another by Michelle

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

‘I Used to Go Here’ is now in select theaters and on demand. All press images are courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.

#kris rey #i used to go here #college film #college comedy #comedy #jemaine clement #gillian jacobs #female director #directed by women #52 films by women #kate micucci #jorma taccone #letterboxd

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cath-with-a-c · 5 years ago

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When there really was no other way - a different father-son dynamic in AC (rant)

This is a continuation of my other post, focusing a lot on the relationship between William and Desmond, where I talked about the abusive behavior, and how it seems to be lowkey condoned in a lot of media. Warning - this post is super long

One of the most popular defenses when it comes to parental abuse is the idea that “there was no other way”, that in order for the child to benefit in the long run you have to hurt them now. The real-world example would be medical procedures and certain types of physical therapy, that hurt no matter how gently you go about them, but they are important to the child’s well-being and/or survival. In fiction, particularly in fantasy/sci-fi, it’s usually some type of training or skill, that has to be acquired in limited time, or ability, that can only be unlocked under pressure, that a child needs to survive because the world is more dangerous than ours.

While there are situations where this is plausible and works, still not excusing the fact of the abuse but making the person committing it less disgusting. the idea of “there was no other way” gets grossly misused. And, when William’s behavior towards Desmond is being shoehorned in that category, I get mad, because no, William is just abusive. What’s more, there IS a father-son relationship in AC-universe (albeit in the comic), that does fall under “there was no other way”.

I’m talking about Nikolai Orlov and his son Kenya, Daniel Cross’ ancestors as portrayed by comic “Assassin’s Creed - The Chain”. In 1926, Nikolai and Kenya live off the grid somewhere in the US, hiding form both Assassins and Templars. At one point in the comic, an 8-year-old Kenya is made to sleep outside as a punishment during winter until he manages to do his father’s bidding.

If we take the situation without context, it is a clear picture of parental abuse. However, I can name a few reasons, accurately presented in the comic, that make it “there was no other way” situation and why the same points don’t work for William and Desmond. The list of 5 (-ish) reasons is as follows: #0 - Do we know them? This is not an actual reason, that’s why it’s at #0, but it’s a good foundation - for us, Nikolai isn’t a new character, we are not introduced to him making his 8yo son sleep outside. There already was a 3-issue comic, that gave us an insight on his character and values, we have an opinion on him.

William, on the other hand, gets an introduction by being an asshole to others and showing no normal human emotion in the face if his son being in a coma and his protege’s death. Granted, I’m not sure if the Ubisoft tried to make his connection to Des a surprise, but his first full introduction at the start of AC3 when we already know he is the father is... actually the same - him being an asshole.

#1 - An established good parent One of the main reasons why for me the comic situation is more plausible is that Nikolai is established as a good parent by the narrative. He and Kenya live off the grid, all alone, away from people, he has no one to impress by being a socially adequate parent. However, his behavior toward Kenya is undoubtedly supportive and loving. The comic starts with the father and son hunting and Kenya being a soft-hearted kid, being unable to shoot the already wounded doe. Nikolai’s reaction? He tries to cheer his son up, by joking that next time they can hunt fenceposts. He doesn’t show any disappointment or anger, he doesn’t belittle Kenya for failing him. From their interactions, we get the sense that Nikolai, while very jaded by everything that happened to him, tries his best to be a good father to his only son.

This is important because the “no other way” scenario only works if it’s not the norm, If the abuse is limited to that particular situation and not all-encompassing.

William, once again, isn’t shown to be even somewhat good parent, at least not objectively, like Nikolai. The only moment when Bill is objectively not terrible comes in AC: Revelations when he talks about how Desmond killed Lucy, and he got to train both of them and it’s sad. It’s a simple dialog line, with an appropriately soft tone of voice (also a side note - gotta give it to the voice actor - he fucking nails the arrogant asshole voice, I literally get hives), and the way it’s so unlike Bill is lampshaded by Shaun, asking him if he’s gone soft. Every other instance of Bill being not terrible comes from Desmond whose perception is skewed by the impending doom. That’s why the attempt to establish something similar to comic in AC4, in the audio file n3, doesn’t work - it’s from Desmond’s perspective, it’s not objective.

#2 - No time to waste (or literally any other external constraint) When the “no other way” scenario is used right, there are constraints in place, that lead to parent turning to abuse as the last resort. In fiction, it’s usually a lack of time to train or acquire the skill properly.

In the comic, the abuse comes after another assassin, Sergei, finds Nikolai and threatens Kenya’s life. Realizing, that soon there will be more people coming through and that he is a bit too old to properly protect his son (he has to be at around 60-70 at the time), Nikolai resorts to speed-training Kenya how to ambush and kill, using himself as target and bait. It’s, honestly, brutal and heartbreaking, watching a sweet, soft kid gradually losing his humanity in order to do his father’s bidding. And even more so when you realize, that before that Nikolai was willing to take his son’s education in this particular area as slow as he could - and now that opportunity is gone, because the enemy could come knocking on their door any day (another side note - I actually believe that sleeping outside was not only a punishment and incentive but also done so that if the attack happen, the kid had better chance at getting out).

One could argue, that the time crunch existed in William’s and Desmond’s case too, and that one would be wrong. We are actually shown, how the pre-Daniel Cross assassin communities looked like - mostly in passing, but one of them is shown inside and out. In previous comic, the Fall, Daniel ends up in one of the assassin compounds. It’s large enough that the people living there don’t necessarily know everyone else who lives there (that’s why at first they believed Daniel was from there), it’s located close enough to the city that no one bats an eye on someone sneaking out to get drunk unless they get so pissed they start mistaking civilians for Templars. The general vibe the compound leaves is akin to Xavier’s school from X-men. Those assassin’s don’t look like they are on the verge of running, they look like equal players, just not as public as Templars. And at the same time, out there in the Black Hills, 11-year-old Desmond is going through training from hell while unable to ever leave the compound and already losing any belief in the cause.

What’s interesting is that time crunch could be applied to Desmond’s upbringing, if he was made younger - 21 instead of 25, or if the Daniel’s Purge was moved from 2000 to 1996. That would create a situation where most of the Brotherhood is gone, the Farm is one of the last communes left standing, and they have to suddenly up Desmond’s training, while he’s around 9 years old, and probably yet to realize what happened and why.

#3 - Tangible threat Segwaying from #2, the threat is another thing that makes “no other way” situation work. Usually, the threat is what creates constraints for training, while also fueling the parent’s want to give the child a survival chance, and that overrides their morals.

In the comic, the threat is tangible and undeniable to both Nikolai and Kenya - they’ve already been attacked, and there are more people to come.

In the games, while the threat is real, it’s not immediate. Moreover, it never becomes more than a boogieman to Desmond, because there’s no evidence given, just war stories (yet another side note - in one of @esamastation‘s works, sometime yesterday, there was a very interesting take on why the education on the Farm was built as it was. Check it out, it’s far better than anything I could ever write). Desmond isn’t dumb, I highly doubt he’d miss something like an active attack, or the fact that some adults go away from the Farm and never come back for no reason. So it means that objectively Desmond was safe all along - moreover when he’d run away, it took Templars nine years to find him. The threat was never as close as it would need to be to warrant abuse.

#4 - Limits For the “no other way” scenario to work, the abuse should not be something the parent usually does, and that means, amongst other things, that it’s supposed to be limited to a specific instance.

In the comic, the abuse is limited to Nikolai having a specific goal in mind - for Kenya to learn how to ambush and kill without hesitation; when the goal is achieved? The abuse stops immediately. As soon as Kenya proves that he is ready to defend himself from anyone, Nikolai stops him and embraces him, reassuring the kid.

In Bill’s and Desmond’s case... well, let me just quote Desmond himself on this: “What scared me was the training. Sweat, tears, bloody lip every once in a while. How far were they going to push me? I couldn't stand it! What was the point? For years and years I thought some major catastrophe was on the horizon. I didn't know what to expect. “ (c) Desmond’s Journey - Training. I’m not gonna even comment on this.

#5 - Payoff Last but not least - if there is no other way, then it has to mean something, contribute to the story at large. The abuse becomes a setup - and needs a payoff

In Kenya’s case, the harsh training he received was pivotal to his survival. His ambushing skill helped him get the attackers into a trap, and in the end, he mercy-killed his father and the last attacker in one shot an managed to escape. If there was no training, he would’ve been a liability and ended up dead.

However, in Desmond’s case you could actually delete the abuse part altogether, make Bill a harsh, but not abusive father and nothing would change to Desmond’s arc. The abuse wasn’t the reason he’d run away - the reason was his lack of belief in a cause and his want to see the world. His arc was about embracing his identity as an Assassin - and you still could have this internal conflict without the abuse part. His external conflict with Bill also didn’t need abuse to back it up - they have dissonant values. Even the training doesn’t factor in - Desmond gets re-trained using the Animus. There is no payoff

In conclusion, while parental abuse is inexcusable, there are ways to portray it in a manner that wouldn’t have your audience lining up to kill the parent. But in the end, it’s still important to understand, that even the abuse that comes from a place of love and out of genuine necessity (and not just justified in this way) can still fuck the victim over and they don’t have to forgive the parent. It just makes the parent not a total scumbag. (thanks for sticking with me till the end)

#assassin's creed #assassin's creed comics #Desmond Miles #william miles #nikolai orelov #rant #writing help #i guess #meta #i got carried away again

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kathemy · 7 years ago

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Gotham: One of my Three Soups

Full unabridged review

Leave it to a show like Gotham to force me to go political.

I would like to preface the following: I absolutely hate writing negative reviews of a show most dear to my heart, and I really wish I could stop.

So why don't I?

In starting, this will likely be my longest review to date. You may accuse me of navel-gazing. If this isn't your cup of tea, move away. However... This is that dialectical cusp where I have to break down everything in order to continue, and it'll be messy.

I've loved Gotham from season one episode seven. I've loved Batcat since episode nine. I started posting about both - after having sunk deep into the stinking swamp of the Vampire Diaries fandom - in anticipation of the second season, which turned out to be fantastic. I joined the Doux team specifically to cover my favorite show in the middle of that season.

Once I was hooked... That was it. There was no going back. I've never stopped loving Gotham. When it comes to this enterprise, the sky's the limit - it can produce astonishingly beautiful, content-rich, engaging television, a subtle evolution of relationships, fantastic characters, and it's populated by arguably the best main cast on network television.

That's probably why I'm harsh at it at times. I know the show's upper ceiling is so high, and I just wish for it to realize itself in every outing, which is probably impossible. In retrospect, I was picky in my season two reviews, but back then we were all on such a high that if I weren't I'd been reduced to raving nonstop, and that's not a hallmark of a good critic. However, the second part is that Gotham has been stumbling, it's made catastrophic mistakes and it's sometimes painful to watch, even as there are glimpses or more of its trademark excellence left.

And I guess that's what keeps me here. I'm so in love with the cast, the characters and the show's flashes of brilliance that I will never abandon it, even if the show occasionally hurts me.

Long ago, back in 2015, I made a tumblr post about everything that was right with Gotham. This was in response to some senseless bashing which was all-too-prevalent those days. It's a bit twisted that back then, I was fighting the haters and considered a die-hard fanboy, and now, people try to pick fights with me for daring to talk shit about a show which I still love.

Two selling points in that piece were how Gotham ignored age- and gender-based stereotypes, and here by season four, Gotham has betrayed both of these qualities, albeit in very different ways.

It betrayed the first one by insisting that a young girl could not be allowed a seductress storyline - a clear shift from season two where Silver St. Cloud did just that - and expulsed Clare Foley for bikini model Maggie Geha. The result was a train wreck.

It betrayed the second one by buying hook line and sinker into the new gender stereotypes of the Hollywood chic, though it's ironic how Patryk commented on my last review how maybe they were going for that "Sixties sexist vibe". Those traditions have some points in common, and curiously Gotham almost seems to lean on both.

Anyway... if you're still here... this is where I'm starting my real review. Here goes.

'One of my Three Soups'. Only in Gotham. When I first read that title, I thought "well, they probably just wanted to figure out the weirdest possible name for an episode; God knows if it'll actually mean anything." Color me surprised when it was actually a clean reference to a scene, and a good one too!

This is the first episode introducing the terrible trio of Jerome, Scarecrow and Mad Hatter, and they really work well together. Scarecrow looks and sounds like lifted straight out of Arkham Knight. Jervis Tetch never had smarter turns of dialog - the content may be another matter - and Jerome is, well, Jerome, giving anyone a run for their money at overacting. These are actual, raving mad supervillains and they certainly are both menacing and entertaining. Their "plan" is signature Gotham - ostensibly clever while not making much sense if you think it over, but it provides for lots of fun.

The triple treat of the evening is Tetch jerking around with Gordon, Bruce and Selina trying to catch Jerome, and Barbara's adventures with the League of Shadows. The first two parts are pretty good or better.

It seems that Gotham is close to figuring out what to do with its chief protagonist; it only took four seasons! The gist that it's selling is Jim's realization that "I'm a little shit, but I have to pretend to be a hero and do my job anyway," and that's a damn good look on him. Jim's never exactly sold "jaded" before - he's sold "tired", "angry", "self-righteous", "more angry" and "apathetic", but here he's finally starting to come through as something that could lead up to his comic book role, as well as someone having a great deal in common with a younger Harvey Bullock. Speaking of Bullock, their conflict seems mostly resolved, but it also seems he's been cast in the role of Jim's eternal bad conscience.

In conclusion it's quite poetic how Jim wins his fight with the Mad Hatter exactly by resigning to the fact that he is helpless - "I can't save you. Save each other." As well as being actually clever, this is the single most powerful line Jim Gordon's delivered in the run of the show.

Bruce's quest for Jerome is classic boneheaded Batman territory, with Bruce both steadfastly determined to bring in Jerome by himself rather than leave it to the cops as well as being completely unable to entertain the notion that anyone will be allowed to die in the process. The cool thing about it, though, is that now we actually have a reason for it - he's simply so traumatized over the fallout of him killing Ra's Al Ghul that he's terrified that something like that might ever happen again.

Baby Batcat's little flirt keeps on escalating, as it's done over the show's whole run. If the show won't soon act on all that tension, it'll win the prize for "worst string-along in television history." Their dialog is extremely "Batman/Catwoman"-esque here, even mimicking a heated scene from 'Batman Returns', but the main takeaway isn't that. If I'm to pick one key part of their conversation, it would be Bruce telling Selina that "you don't owe me anything... You never did," and Selina lighting up like a sun. This is final closure for all of their contrived excuses to spend time together, as Selina is now absolute sure that Bruce is there because he wants her.

The other major thing's the evolution of how they relate to each other wordlessly. In all that matters, their age difference has vanished, and for the first time in the show's history, their connection is borderline sexual. This episode also marks the first time Bruce actually teases Selina in a romantic fashion, pulling the old "pretend-kiss" trick, rather than the other way around, and that's a very amusing touch. Also, David's scenes with Cameron are damn well-acted, and for some reason I found the scene with Jerome terrorizing his uncle, with the grunts of the fight and Bruce basically flying all over the cafeteria in the background, hysterically funny.

... and then we have Barbara And The Ninjas, which is the figurative straw to break my camel's back.

I think what makes me most angry about this episode is how it somehow manages to push me, kicking and screaming, straight into the filthy arms of the MRA crowd. I don't want to be here. I have avoided to tackle this issue head on for the longest time. Maybe I'm a coward. All I know is I can't pretend anymore, and if that pisses people off, so be it.

Here we have what Ben McKenzie refers to as a "bit of a female empowerment storyline" about Barbara Kean ascending to the post of the First Female Demon's Head of the resurgent League of Shadows. We have the straw misogynist character of the captain challenging her authority and then we have - wait for it - all the women shooting all the men in the back because they are weak and weak men must die.

This whole scene is insanely cringe-worthy; whole slews of dialog seemingly just written to tick off a checklist. I actually fast-forwarded it at my first watching once I saw where it was headed, but then I had to steel myself and power it through for the review. One of the more plain-disgusting aspects of it all is how all men are murdered only after she's easily dispatched of the token male asshole and scared all the rest of them into crawling before her in fear, effectively tripling down on the punch with three perverted Girl Power triumphs in one single set.

This discourse is toxic, and it’s hard not to get toxic in return. This is what produces tumblr posts like this:

... and reddit threads like this:

That last one is a new one, isn't it?!

It's especially interesting how Gotham's subreddit, which contrary to public thought isn't normally a woman-hating hellhole, nevertheless responds positively to the thread in question, if contentious. Likewise how nobody seemingly will challenge the gross statement of the first post in the tumblr echo chamber.

There's a standing obsession in Hollywood with writing "strong female characters" - just look at the discourse behind and after 'The Last Jedi'. Obviously that's laudable, but this is most often "realized" by appealing to the basest, most shallow, most vulgar undercurrents of the liberal-bourgeoise, identitarian pseudo-left.

In short, Hollywood rarely writes "strong women" as in believable, complex characters that you can root for. They are far more on-the-nose about it. Maybe she can lift a really heavy object?? Mostly, though, the women are shown as being "strong" by effortlessly annihilating all men looking at them the wrong way, and ironically that makes them weaker characters.

Gotham has steadily slumped into this bankrupt black pit since the third season. In fact, you can probably date it back to when Bruno Heller lost all creative power over the show, with things now seemingly run-by-committee or possibly just by Danny Cannon.

For example, see the Bruce/Selina discourse. Now, first, their scenes are magic this episode, and I love, love, love them, but this narrative remains: Bruce struggles, while Selina just wins. I don't believe we've ever seen Selina with a mark on her face after a fight. That means that Bruce has character development in that department, while Selina's just an auto-win button to use as needed.

The scene with Bruce tackling the circus strongman is perfect. It is perfect just because it is tough. The dude is three times his size!!! Bruce doesn't even win, he's about to get choked to death, and then Selina just shows up the knight in shining armor with a whip and everything's roses. But the point is Bruce tries, he doesn't give up, and we get to see this evolution first-hand. We hardly ever get the same with poor Catgirl.

However, Gotham goes one step beyond the normal discourse by taking storylines that should have rightfully belonged to male characters and giving them to women as part of the "female empowerment" shtick, and this is where it hurts the show the most, as well as where we find out how the writing truly is at fault.

Just as the grudge match between Jim, Ozzie and Sofia would ideally have been symbolically resolved between those three characters - and if the lead protagonist were female, it would have; just imagine the outcry if Luke swoops in to save the day and murder Kilgrave in the Jessica Jones finale because last episode, Kevin kicked him in the nuts! - so too the "Demon's Head" storyline rightfully belongs to Bruce.

Ra's Al Ghul forced Bruce Wayne, his prince and chosen heir, to murder him in order to succeed him. This was the most potent and original development of early season four given massive attention through several episodes, and Gotham now cheats their viewers out of the juicy consequences of that story - which would go perfectly in line with the fallout of that act according to the established mythos - with Bruce suddenly thrust into the role of the leader of some weird supernatural villain army, by handing it all over to Barbara.

I believe the reason this is happening is that Gotham doesn't bother to create believable grudge matches for their female characters to win, nor does the show care to craft the grand arcs that could make them earn these moments on their own merits. Unlike Bruce, who made the conscious choice to kill Ra's, Barbara didn't choose to come back to life, nor did she choose this power. Ra's was her Deus ex machina, and now she's a figurehead heeding his silent whispers. In summary it's an afterthought that doesn't even win the character any agency, plastered-on to win cheap representation points.

This type of writing hurts Gotham's core fanbase. A significant chunk of that are young-to-middle-aged men. They don't want to be belittled for the deplorable act of owning a penis, and they don't want to hear that they are all evil, weak, expendable and useless. They hear that all the time, both in news and in fiction, and it's not right that they should be demonized for a collective, historical sin. As much as I hate using the term, Gotham's been a "safe space."

It also hurts the women watching the show, in part by saddling them with poorly-developed psychopaths for role models and by indoctrinating them in the belief that "men are scum who are only out to get us", but I am choosing not to go into that overtly, as I've discussed some of this numerous times in the past.

This concludes my breakdown of the current gender discourse of Gotham. I verily don't want to have to write more about it, which is part of the reason I chose to go into such detail here. I'd much rather concentrate on good, relatable stories.

Now we have Bruce and Jim both gearing up for the fight with Jerome, Jonathan and Jervis. We have Riddler and Penguin returning to the scene. Hell, I think we might even get some progression with Bruce and Selina. As has been the case all season, next episode could very well be fantastic. Gotham has that ability to surprise you with a spectacular home run now and again.

If not for one atrocious scene I'd rated this one highly, but in a way I guess it's worth banging your head on the table for five straight minutes to get the pleasure of forty good minutes of Gotham.

P.S. Aren't the screenshot edits spiffy? I got really pleased with them. D.S.

#gotham #gotham review #mine

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ichigo777666 · 4 years ago

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Power Rangers Season 18

This is my critiques/review of Season 18 of Power Rangers, aka Power Rangers Samurai. Note that these will be my opinions. You might hate things I like or like things I hate - if you wanna comment in your opinions, or ask questions that’s fine with me.

All segments will have SPOILERS for that season so if you don’t want to know how something ends, don’t read. Find it below!

This is a bit of an odd season as Samurai and the next series Super Samurai are direct continuations. For this part, I am ONLY considering what happens in Samurai (Season 18).

Basis of the Season: Ancient sealed evil demons wake up and try to free themselves from the netherworld and flood the world. To do this they have to rise the level of water in the river via human misery and sadness. A team of pre-detemined Samurai warriors from ancient bloodlines join to fight against them.

What I think of the 'heroes': When I think of the rangers, one thing comes to mind: The voice acting….omg the voice acting. Everything is spoken in this oh-so-serious monotone with emphasis on every word...and no emotion. Emily talking about her sick sister and Jayden talking about his father’s last words are spoken the exact same way as any normal conversation. It honestly feels like no one had time to learn any lines & cue cards were being held up off camera for every scene of dialog. The only time there’s any emotion or inflection is when they’re transformed...aka when they’re just dubbing. This is true most obviously in the first few episodes. As the series progresses, some grow out of this habit. Emily and Mike (and Antonio later) all seem to gain actual personalities. Mia is stuck in this weird zone of half the time sounding flat and other times being emotional...but Jayden & Kevin remain stuck in this rut forever. That being said, I like Mike and Emily from the original 5. Antonio is also good. These are the only three that get actual real character development.

What I think of the 'villains': A group of mostly “ho-hum” characters. Xandred’s only quality in this season is that he’s got a headache and he’s angry. Octooru’s voice and sometimes rhyming got old in one episode. Dayu’s okay but she gets so little screen time apart from like 2 episodes that it’s hard to judge. The best villain character is definitely Deker.

My overall impression of this season: If you’ve noticed, which I assume since you’re reading this my posting for season 17 was over two years ago...there’s no real reason other than I really don’t like this season. I must have started to watch these episodes and then quit a dozen times. I eventually only got through this series by finding the episodes online and watching them at 1.75x speed.... Why Well:

- The background music is obnoxiously loud in this season. 18 seasons and this is the first one where I struggled to hear dialog over some of the music, especially during fight scenes.

-The voice acting (see the Heros section above)

- Some of the special effects seem awful this season. In the first two episodes alone, there’s a scene where Red cuts a car in half which looks so fake it’s as if they weren’t even trying. An episode later, he swings his big smasher and some of the henchmen feet away from the blade that are not in range just go “flying” and the circle of goons that was there before the slice are all suddenly gone despite the fact that only two were seen being “hit”.

-The fact that during the second episode after being hit & unmorphed, the four just stare and watch Red fight while commenting on ‘how cool’ he basically is was just...no. It felt like a scene from a bad fanfiction story. And they wait until he gets knocked down to remorph and help rather than doing that from the start...because they had to do that commentary on how Red is so cool. This “standing around watching/commenting” happens WAY too often.Throughout the whole season there are tons of occasions of one person (usually Jayden) going on to fight alone and the others just hanging back and doing nothing until Jayden gets into trouble and THEN they decide to go help.

-There are multiple things that make NO COMMON SENSE. Why is Pink’s zord a turtle when her element is sky/wind? Could they not think of a BIRD for her or something that, you know, FLIES? Explain to me how a turtle connects to wind?! SECONDLY, are their identities supposed to be secret this season or not? Based on the first few episodes where they just blatantly walk around and then morph I was thinking no but apparently it’s yes? They’re not even trying to be subtle here… They’ve morphed with people around multiple times and often with people who know them around too...so how are they being secretive? There’s multiple scenes where they walk into an area with Nightlok and people and then morph...how hard would it have been to stop ten feet back & morph where no one is or around a corner? Nope, right in the middle! And they can do it...they just choose not to…. As the series progresses this happens less and less which leaves you wondering WHY they did this in the beginning?

-The plots are one liners that get resolved with no real character development. There’s some plot that are just NOT PLOTS. There’s so much filler that this becomes obvious. The amount of full separate morph sequences where they go one at a time and show them all is so high I stopped counting at 10; they obviously needed to waste time. They brought back comic relief Bulk +1...to waste time...

What I think the season needed more/less of: MORE PLOT, less of ALL the above.

My favorite character: It’s terrible hard to pick...because so many characters are just....meh. It’s going to be Deker for being the only consistent character with some motivation and a good character. Mike’s a good second

My least favorite character: Jayden. Jayden’s personality is so flat it’s painful to watch him.

The best episode: No. There IS NO BEST EPISODE. Instead, I’m going to talk about the worst episode...not the worst made or the most boring but the one where the characters make such baffling decisions that the episode literally has you yelling at the screen at these idiots. And that is Episode 4 Deal With a Nighlok. The plot is simple: a Nighlok decides to fill the river by ruining someone’s dream. The Nighlok chooses a child who plays baseball but misses his dad who’s in the army; the Nighlok convinces the kid to give up one baseball with the promise that if he does, he can see his dad. The Rangers show up; the kid won’t tell them anything; they follow the kid; the kid does what the Nightlok says and gets double-crossed; the Rangers defeat the Nighlok and the kid goes back to play baseball. Here are the highlights of the baffling decisions/weird occurrences that happen in just this one episode.

-The rangers find a Nighlok talking with a kid, tell the kid to run away while they fight the Nighlock, and then immediately go running around to find that same kid to ask the kid what the Nightlok wanted. Why didn’t they just have the child hide? Or have someone guard him when it was obvious it was talking to him?!

-Also the kid was wearing a very obvious baseball uniform...so why didn’t they immediately check there? Blue & Pink just randomly find him on a path. Mind you they have no idea where he was going or where he lives...and they just happen on him.

-They then approach the kid as their normal selves instead of as Rangers...whom the kid would obviously look up to, seeing as they literally saved him moments ago. Instead they’re counting on this child to talk to two total strangers...which obviously fails, so they stalk him...and then stakeout his house.

-The kid also has the quickest change ever. The kid goes around a corner and the rangers follow shortly after. In like 3 seconds he’s gotten off his bike, unzipped his jacket, taken it off, and picked up his bat. The jacket is just gone and in none of the following shots.

-Oh did I mention they SUCK as stake-outs? Instead of having shifts the same two just stay there...and do the inevitable which is fall asleep.

-During the stakeout, the Blue ranger lies to Pink’s face and tells her her cooking is good...which leads to Pink attempting to cook (to the others’ horror) for the rest of the season. The “samurai code’ guy chooses to LIE....

-They also have the “perfect” timing as they wake up just as the kid is leaving his house.

-They also somehow know the kid’s name….despite the kid not talking to him, the Nighlok not mentioning it, or anyone else talking to the child!

-The kid eventually throws some of his things away into a bin. The show shows the garbage truck throwing the bin away automatically (it’s one of those trucks with the automatic grabber) but later in a flashback there’s suddenly a garbage man doing the job...so continuity?

- Also said garbage man fished the stuff out of the bin and then went out of his way to find the team somewhere in the city to return it???

-The Nighlok turns big (as usual) and rampages but after it’s been defeated the kids just go on to have a baseball game...like it’s noting....

-Jayden then makes the decision to use his powers in public IN front of two teams and an audience to make a magical version of the kid’s dad appear??????

-Also, predictably, the kid hits a homerun on his first try...the team celebrates like the kid has won the game when he’s literally the first hitter….

Overall Rating: 1/10. I would normally justify why but...just read all the above...

#power rangers season 18 #power rangers samurai

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tkscz · 7 years ago

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DC vs Marvel: Animation Justice League Action vs Avengers Assemble

I know before I said I'd start this with X-men: TAS vs Batman: TAS, but because I knew I had to watch these two shows, as I haven't before, I began watching them and, I'd rather write this now while these two shows are on my mind.

There are multiple reasons why I chose these two shows to compare, most obvious being that it's Justice League vs Avengers, you pretty much have to do that. But also, the fact that these two shows were made with the purpose of promoting their respective movies (though I don't see JLA helping that at all as this show is way more influenced by the comics than the movies. AA on the other hand is way more influenced by the movies than the comics). Lastly these two seem to have gotten a negative reputation among them, so going into either, I wasn't expecting much, and I can say neither are "end this show now" bad, but one of these two aren't exactly good either. So, without further ado, let's get started.

Writing

Justice League Action: The writing here is obviously aimed at a younger audience and is definitely meant to be more of an action/comedy series, with a little more focus on the comedy aspect. Cartoon Network isn't really interested in pure action shows anymore so this makes sense, especially with the popularity of Teen Titans Go. However, unlike the aforementioned Teen Titans Go, the jokes aren't low brow or toilet humor, (most of the time) but they aren't the most complicated jokes to understand. That's not to say they are bad. Admittedly, I enjoyed the humor more than I assumed I was. I honestly thought it was going to be a bunch of corny jokes and a bunch of quips coming at me every two minutes, but the show surprised me on how it crafts its humor. It reminds me of early Fairly Odd Parents or second season Sonic Boom. The jokes are snappy, well timed, and are only told when needed. The dialog isn't bad either. That is to say, it works for the type of show this is. Nothing sounds too off, though when they want a character to sound or be annoying (usually Plastic-man or Booster Gold), they make them sound as annoying as possible. I mean, I get what they are trying to do here, write the annoying characters as annoying as they can be so that when they do the heroic thing, the audience gets a sense of pay-off, but they can tone it down a bit. The dial can be on 7 or 8, doesn't have to be 11. As for other characters, they do a good job writing each one as close as possible to their comic book counterpart, though, as said before with annoying characters, some of their personalities get a little over emphasized (looking at you Wonder Woman). Overall, I would say the writing is pretty good. Balanced dialog for the most part, characters are pretty well done and the humor works for what type of show it's trying to be. It's nothing to write home about but works.

Avengers Assemble: The writing for this show is different from Justice League Action as this show is meant to be taken more seriously than the JLA. It's written more as a pure action serious with the way it's dialog is handled. Jokes are used as a way of braking tension instead of being used as it's natural dialog. The problem here is that tension is written blandly and so are the jokes. The show takes itself quite seriously but isn't written in a way where the audience can take it as serious. The dialog is way too bland for it. There's no enthusiasm in what the characters say. It's partly on the voice actors, (something I'm trying not to bring up, but in this case, there is no getting around it), but mostly it's because the script. It's possible, but it is not easy to act enthusiastically when the script is boring. It's such a bland script and comes off as paint by numbers. At times the dialog doesn't even come off as natural. Most of the time they keep calling each other by codename instead of their actual names. It becomes awkward when they start talking about how close they are as a team and as friends, but rarely use real names. You also know what they are going to say sometimes before they say it because it's the obvious thing to say. I want to say the dialog gets better in the later seasons, but it doesn't. In fact, it gets harder to pin some parts of it down. Like Tony is sometimes his lovable asshole self, but then he is super serious Tony in other episodes and then lovable asshole again. This would work if he was a mix of both in most episodes, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Then there is the comedy and let me tell you, it's good jokes are few and far between as this show will hit you with so many quips. This action scenes are full with quip after quip after quip. It's shooting you with quips at you at 50 puns an hour. And the jokes rarely make me giggle, let alone laugh. Honestly, I can only remember one laugh out loud joke from the entire series. Captain America wakes from being hurt and told Falcon that he won't lie to him, he thought he was going to die, but then pauses and goes "why did I say that, I never lie." And I honestly thought that was well timed and really funny. Otherwise the show mostly just makes quips and puns that rarely hit and feel ill timed. Like come on guys, just fight the villain of the day, please stop making bad jokes about everything you do. Overall, the writing here is just boring dialog and bad puns.

Better of the two: Yeah, it's pretty obvious I'm choosing JLA. I actually had a hard time listening to Avengers Assemble. Either I'm bored or I'm cringing. I get the feelings of cringe from JLA at times, but Avengers Assemble has me more shocked when it's writing isn't making me cringe.

JLA Wins

Story

Justice League Action: JLA is purely episodic. Each fifteen-minute episode is self-contained and the show doesn't have any continuity from one episode to another, even if said episode isn't played directly after the previous. That being said, the show does a really good job telling the story it needs to in the time given. In the 10 to 15 minutes it's got it gets through the six steps on the ol' plot diagram. You know how it goes, exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. Of course, it's not perfectly in that order, but it still manages to work. Now this isn't saying all the stories work out. Quite a few of them have cringey or hard to sit through expositions and conflicts, looking at you "Meet the Kryptonians", but most of those ones tend to get better once it hits the rising action. This show also does character development better than it should. It's episodic, so no matter how they develop within the story of an episode, they'll go right back to their status quo next time they show up. Plastic-man is a good example. He goes through some good development and gains respect by the resolution, but the next episode, nope, no more respect. This is kind of why people like continuity, gets annoying to watch characters change their minds about someone/something, only for them to be the same way the following episode. Overall the stories aren't bad, they do a very good job for the time allowed but with the show being episodic, I actual feel they are doing TOO good of a job on a standalone story that has no long-standing consequences in the show's running.

Avengers Assemble: Where JLA was fully episodic, AA is only semi-episodic with an ongoing story per season. Basically, there are a lot of filler episodes, but there is an over-arching plot. Season 1 may be an exception to that as there wasn't really a plot there, but some continuity. Season two started having more plot and more multi-part episodes. Seasons 3 and 4 is when it's obvious there is plot to focus on more than there is filler. Again, the problem becomes how bland it all is. The stories became quickly predictable, down to the point where I just felt myself going "well I'm not surprised" a lot. Sometimes characters are brought into the story simply as plot devices and then are never seen again, even when it would make total sense for them to return. Sometimes plot points are brought into the story for no reason. Example in the four parter Civil War (Marvel please stop trying to make Civil War happen) in which Black Bolt had a machine that would seal up every inhuman on Earth in order to bring peace between humans and inhumans after they were being controlled by Ultron. He goes to that machine and was about to use it, but Captain America told him not to and rather than turn it off, Black Bolt destroys the machine. That entire plot point was pointless and could've been gotten rid of. The pacing in the episodes also tends to be off. Things happen too fast or off scene so things sometimes just come out of nowhere. Sometimes they build something up only to resolve it almost immediately, leaving it feeling unsatisfying. I'll give them that they don't leave hanging plot points. They do resolve everything, but the bad pacing causes the endings not to be satisfying. Sometimes the episodes feel like they're stretching because they resolved one or two plot points too fast and now they have to pad the time be doing the same thing they just did at a different area. Overall, the stories are just bland, not bad, but predictable. The pacing is what really ruins it as things end too early and it makes the episodes feel long.

Better of the two: Honestly, this one is a draw. JLA's short format and not having continuity can make the show feel repetitive when specific characters show up over and over again and have to go through the same issue over and over again, but those plots are never really bad and they mix it up well each time they do it, so it feels like you've seen it before, at the same time it still has the feeling of being fresh. AA's stories aren't bad, just uninspired and really badly paced. You know where the story is going and how it's going to end and you can guess the twist before it ever happens, but they do take care of every loose end and it does keep up with character development and continuity. They both have flaws that could push a lot of people away, but both of pros that could bring them in.

Draw

Art Style

Justice League Action: This is definitely where you can tell the show was made mostly for children. It's art style is super colorful, very bright and vivid and everything about it pops out, and you know what, it really works. Everything stands out. Everyone looks so unique from their face to their bodies. They did this thing with faces where eye sizes and facial features placements are always slightly different so you can always tell who whom is no matter what. Though I will admit, while it does do different body shapes for many of the characters, a lot of them have the same body shape, normally the villains. The backgrounds are also a bit bland. I know it's so that the characters pop out more, but at times the backgrounds feel washed out. Overall, I love the art on the characters, but the backgrounds could be better.

Avengers Assemble: Just like the story, the art work here is just bland. The colors are dim and drab. There is very little shading done, the characters almost never deviate in shape or size unless it's the obvious like a kid character or a Hulk, and even then, the Hulks don't look that different in body shape, just taller and slightly wider. The backgrounds can look better than the characters, but unless something is happening, it usually isn't breath taking. Things only got worse in the fourth season. Characters no longer have shading or lighting, so they all look very distilled. The backgrounds have shading and lighting still so now the characters look out of place. At times it’s just really hard to look at.

Better of the two: JLA takes this one. While the backgrounds can be washed out looking, at least the characters match it. AA feels like they took the piss in character modeling and season four took a bigger piss with detailing. The art looks so boring and dead compared to JLA’s more lively art style.

Winner: JLA

Animation

Justice League Action: The animation in this show is very lively and dynamic. The backgrounds may be washed out but they also feel alive with motion. There is some CG here and there but nothing intrusive, just a hologram or something of the like. Characters move naturally in comparison to their sizes and shapes and capabilities. The Flash feels fast, Superman’s punches feel hard, Plasticman looks like something between a liquid and a solid and it’s all thanks to some great animation. That’s not to say it’s perfect, and if I’m honest, which I should be, it suffers from what seems to be, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, lag. At times the animation will just slow down or feel like it’s stuck on frames. Some character motions tend to come off really weird as well. Almost like mistakes they missed or something they were trying but it didn’t go well, but overall the animation is well done. Not Justice League Unlimited levels of well done, but still really good.

Avengers Assemble: This will be the only thing for AA I won’t call bland, because the animation here is just bad. Stilted movements and motions. Terribly done zoom effects to depict depth or motion. It’s like the majority of the animation was done with motion tweens. Then there is the bad lip syncing, horrible use of CG, many, MANY animation errors that include very blatant and visible continuity errors. The fight scenes become nearly impossible to tell what’s going on. Weird camera angles like face zoom ins that happen WHILE another action was happening. AA’s animation is an overall mess.

Better of the two: JLA no doubt about it. It has its mistakes but at least there is more good animation there to balance it out. AA has more mistakes, bad tweens, failed depth depiction, bad lip syncing, terrible CG integration and just awful fight scenes.

Winner: JLA

Overall better series

For this one I’d have to give it to JLA. While they both aren’t the best stories ever told, as animated series, JLA feels like it was something someone wanted to work on, or at least done by those who understand the basics of animation. AA feels undone, like it’s their rough animation and they were about to start working on the details and it was published before they could. If you’re a big fan of the Avengers, I suggest Earth Mightiest heroes, honestly, there isn’t much reason to watch AA, while at the very least JLA is good children’s entertainment and adults can get a laugh out of it too.

Winner: JLA

#marvel #Marvel Comics #dc #DC comics #marvel vs dc #dc vs marvel #animation

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mistermiaou · 7 years ago

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My opinion on The newest episode of The Strain.

As you’ll soon find out, I fucking love this series. I love the books, the comics and crappy spin off comics. I also love the show.. As hard as its been in its last season.. I told you guys I would have rambles about things. So, I’m starting here.. with this episode “Tainted Love”.. (I’ll circle back to last weeks episode too... don’t get me started on that mess).(I don’t plan to explain any characters to new people.. this is a rant specifically for the fans of the strain.. so.. skip this post if you have no interest in this show.. comics.. books.. cause you’re in for a long post.. also SPOILERS)

The Strain is a good series.. Good.. not great.. Its a good TV show if you like vampires, moderately cheesy dialog and a fun cast who all seem to blend together well. This episode was chalk full of humor between characters like Quinlan and Fet.. Eichorst(who is my favorite character) does things.. like being a bad ass and driving a truck shooting at a plane..(which also comes off cheesy in some ways). The main things I wanted to touch on though for this episode of scenes related to Quinlan and Zach.(I hear your groans already. but hear me out..)

Zach this season is more bratty and horrible and we’re starting to see him break down in some ways.. Which is actually pretty awesome.. When Abby is being killed he is seen holding his head and trying to block out what is happening. The books mention him having OCD rituals and anxiety problems due to The Master’s care.. Seeing that part of him freaking out was a nice touch. But it was also a nice touch seeing something so real happen in the series.. I told friends why the scene was hard to watch.. But in a not cringy way.. in a “This hurts on levels only some people will understand”. Its a very real scene of what happens to many people now and days. Zach reacts to rejection like many people have lately.. Abby becoming the victim to that reaction.. I can not tell you how many times I or friends have heard the lines.. “I was nice to you. You were nice to me. I gave you things. Why can’t I be you significant other? You better like me or else”. While.. we all saw her character’s death from a mile a way.. It still stuck out to me. Its one death that will probably stick with me for some time. I’ve been in a dangerous situation where being nice to someone got me hurt because they thought something simple like holding their hand so i don’t fall meant.. “Take me now”.. We hear lots of things on the news or social media of victims being hurt due to someone “rejecting” their love. Abby herself even says “I don’t owe you anything. Thats not how this works”. I loved it.. It was a great scene. So if there’s some one you’re crushing on hard.. If they don’t feel the same way.. please don’t murder them or hurt them..

Now on to Quinlan. This character is drastically different from his other counter parts in the comics and books. Quinlan pretty much doesn’t talk till book 3.. I expect changes to the TV show version. They have to make him super cool and stand out from the others.. They want him to seem mysterious and cold.. Which.. I know that show writers.. stop hammering that into my head. Last week’s episode and this week we learned more about his back story.. Which.. I will literally rant about this for hours on end about why the changes to his background just fall flat and don’t work.. Last week we were introduced to Louisa and daughter. The TV show counter part to Tasa and her daughter.. Like many book fans.. I didn’t like this... (I’m expecting a visit from a certain “critic” for writing this). Louisa is seeking out Quinlan.. because he brother is dying or now dead.. and its the stupidest shit show ever.. (I told you.. i hate it). The flash backs are written like a bad fanfic.. Like.. a bad knock off fanfic. I know I’m suppose to care about this cute child set in a time period I love so much.. But I don’t.. She’s not mentioned or hinted at like Quinlan’s family in the books and comics. She has no tragic back story like Tasa and her daughter.. There’s no real drama or conflict to make me care for them. Tasa was a slave like Quinlan and something they had in common. In the spin off comics we see Quinlan rescuing Tasa and her child while his people are raiding her village.. We’re pretty much set up to care about these characters from the get go. Louisa and her child are well to do. Their story isn’t tragic or set up to make me care about them. She paints Quinlan up(don’t get me going on this make up and wig...) to look human and they... Umm.. I guess have sex? I don’t know what to call the love scene really.. It made me feel.. embarrassed.. I was embarrassed for watching one of my favorite show. Maybe if I wasn’t watching with other people.. I’d feel less embarrassed.. I doubt it.

Anywhoo.. Quinlan fights Papa Master and doesn’t win.. Papa kills not wife and child and Quinlan just sighs and releases his “family”. There’s no heart or soul to these scenes. There’s no drama or heart ache.. It falls flat. In the comics Quinlan is tricked and runs home to Tasa and their child who are now turned and attack him. He’s taunted and has to slay his family.. Its more heart breaking because there’s more of a build up. We grow to like these characters for a few brief moments and really get to see Quinlan grow more as a character. We get to see him “act “ human with out having to be painted human. He is loved for himself and has earned this family. We see them act like a family and Tasa sings to him. We see him being taken care of in the comics by her(the spin off comic).. Louisa’s daughter is seen playing with Quinlan in this episode but It feels stiff. I don’t get the sense of this being a family. We aren’t showed a montage of them being more family like.. or them growing more.. We don’t get to see how close they have gotten. When he says “I have to go fight the master”. Louisa is upset and slaps him.. “What about us” I eye rolled faster than Eichorst dodging bullets. Nothing really feels at sake.. she guilt trips him into her death.. I don’t feel a sadness for these characters.. The only thing that will keep their memories alive is fans going, “You guys remember that awful sex scene?”. I understand many show watchers may not feel this way due to the fact they’ve never read the books. But those who have.. (the many I’ve talked too) do feel that way,

Also, can we talk about what a bad ass Charlotte is? She’s in my new top favorites for the show. She’s a strong female character who can actually defend herself and handles people like a champ. She’s not mean or cold towards Quinlan. She’s the reason they get out of there because she stuck around to fight off Eichorst. She’s not stupid and knows what she wants and how shes going to survive. I’m sad we probably wont see her ever again. But I really did enjoy the character. Her explaining to Fet she wasn’t coming with was one of my favorite parts of the episode. The Strain doesn’t have very many strong female characters at this point.. I don’t count Dutch, her character is awful.. (I have a rant about that later). Sorry let a person gush about a new refreshing character.

Also, when did Eichorst have time to heal from being burned? Gentlemen, I do believe he was on fire.. I know he’s a vampire and all.. but I don’t feel like he had time to heal that fast and go find Quinlan and company out in no where land. I know he had some burn marks.. but.. like.. We skipping where he was ON FIRE?

Welp, I’m going to wrap up this post here. I already know people are going to hate this a lot. But, I welcome the discussion and hate.I know there’s a certain “critic” making her rounds to these things.. So I’m expecting her to appear.

TL/DR:

I rant about shit.. and say stuff i like.

#thestrain #thestrainfx #quinlan #vasilyfet #eichorst

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thisblackmanhewritesnerd-blog · 7 years ago

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DC vs Marvel: Animation Justice League Action vs Avengers Assemble

I know before I said I’d start this with X-men: TAS vs Batman: TAS, but because I knew I had to watch these two shows, as I haven’t before, I began watching them and, I’d rather write this now while these two shows are on my mind.

There are multiple reasons why I chose these two shows to compare, most obvious being that it’s Justice League vs Avengers, you pretty much have to do that. But also, the fact that these two shows were made with the purpose of promoting their respective movies (though I don’t see JLA helping that at all as this show is way more influenced by the comics than the movies. AA on the other hand is way more influenced by the movies than the comics). Lastly these two seem to have gotten a negative reputation among them, so going into either, I wasn’t expecting much, and I can say neither are “end this show now” bad, but one of these two aren’t exactly good either. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Writing

Justice League Action: The writing here is obviously aimed at a younger audience and is definitely meant to be more of an action/comedy series, with a little more focus on the comedy aspect. Cartoon Network isn’t really interested in pure action shows anymore so this makes sense, especially with the popularity of Teen Titans Go. However, unlike the aforementioned Teen Titans Go, the jokes aren’t low brow or toilet humor, (most of the time) but they aren’t the most complicated jokes to understand. That’s not to say they are bad. Admittedly, I enjoyed the humor more than I assumed I was. I honestly thought it was going to be a bunch of corny jokes and a bunch of quips coming at me every two minutes, but the show surprised me on how it crafts its humor. It reminds me of early Fairly Odd Parents or second season Sonic Boom. The jokes are snappy, well timed, and are only told when needed. The dialog isn’t bad either. That is to say, it works for the type of show this is. Nothing sounds too off, though when they want a character to sound or be annoying (usually Plastic-man or Booster Gold), they make them sound as annoying as possible. I mean, I get what they are trying to do here, write the annoying characters as annoying as they can be so that when they do the heroic thing, the audience gets a sense of pay-off, but they can tone it down a bit. The dial can be on 7 or 8, doesn’t have to be 11. As for other characters, they do a good job writing each one as close as possible to their comic book counterpart, though, as said before with annoying characters, some of their personalities get a little over emphasized (looking at you Wonder Woman). Overall, I would say the writing is pretty good. Balanced dialog for the most part, characters are pretty well done and the humor works for what type of show it’s trying to be. It’s nothing to write home about but works.

Avengers Assemble: The writing for this show is different from Justice League Action as this show is meant to be taken more seriously than the JLA. It’s written more as a pure action serious with the way it’s dialog is handled. Jokes are used as a way of braking tension instead of being used as it’s natural dialog. The problem here is that tension is written blandly and so are the jokes. The show takes itself quite seriously but isn’t written in a way where the audience can take it as serious. The dialog is way too bland for it. There’s no enthusiasm in what the characters say. It’s partly on the voice actors, (something I’m trying not to bring up, but in this case, there is no getting around it), but mostly it’s because the script. It’s possible, but it is not easy to act enthusiastically when the script is boring. It’s such a bland script and comes off as paint by numbers. At times the dialog doesn’t even come off as natural. Most of the time they keep calling each other by codename instead of their actual names. It becomes awkward when they start talking about how close they are as a team and as friends, but rarely use real names. You also know what they are going to say sometimes before they say it because it’s the obvious thing to say. I want to say the dialog gets better in the later seasons, but it doesn’t. In fact, it gets harder to pin some parts of it down. Like Tony is sometimes his lovable asshole self, but then he is super serious Tony in other episodes and then lovable asshole again. This would work if he was a mix of both in most episodes, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Then there is the comedy and let me tell you, it’s good jokes are few and far between as this show will hit you with so many quips. This action scenes are full with quip after quip after quip. It’s shooting you with quips at you at 50 puns an hour. And the jokes rarely make me giggle, let alone laugh. Honestly, I can only remember one laugh out loud joke from the entire series. Captain America wakes from being hurt and told Falcon that he won’t lie to him, he thought he was going to die, but then pauses and goes “why did I say that, I never lie.” And I honestly thought that was well timed and really funny. Otherwise the show mostly just makes quips and puns that rarely hit and feel ill timed. Like come on guys, just fight the villain of the day, please stop making bad jokes about everything you do. Overall, the writing here is just boring dialog and bad puns.

Better of the two: Yeah, it’s pretty obvious I’m choosing JLA. I actually had a hard time listening to Avengers Assemble. Either I’m bored or I’m cringing. I get the feelings of cringe from JLA at times, but Avengers Assemble has me more shocked when it’s writing isn’t making me cringe.

JLA Wins

Story

Justice League Action: JLA is purely episodic. Each fifteen-minute episode is self-contained and the show doesn’t have any continuity from one episode to another, even if said episode isn’t played directly after the previous. That being said, the show does a really good job telling the story it needs to in the time given. In the 10 to 15 minutes it’s got it gets through the six steps on the ol’ plot diagram. You know how it goes, exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. Of course, it’s not perfectly in that order, but it still manages to work. Now this isn’t saying all the stories work out. Quite a few of them have cringey or hard to sit through expositions and conflicts, looking at you “Meet the Kryptonians”, but most of those ones tend to get better once it hits the rising action. This show also does character development better than it should. It’s episodic, so no matter how they develop within the story of an episode, they’ll go right back to their status quo next time they show up. Plastic-man is a good example. He goes through some good development and gains respect by the resolution, but the next episode, nope, no more respect. This is kind of why people like continuity, gets annoying to watch characters change their minds about someone/something, only for them to be the same way the following episode. Overall the stories aren’t bad, they do a very good job for the time allowed but with the show being episodic, I actual feel they are doing TOO good of a job on a standalone story that has no long-standing consequences in the show’s running.

Avengers Assemble: Where JLA was fully episodic, AA is only semi-episodic with an ongoing story per season. Basically, there are a lot of filler episodes, but there is an over-arching plot. Season 1 may be an exception to that as there wasn’t really a plot there, but some continuity. Season two started having more plot and more multi-part episodes. Seasons 3 and 4 is when it’s obvious there is plot to focus on more than there is filler. Again, the problem becomes how bland it all is. The stories became quickly predictable, down to the point where I just felt myself going “well I’m not surprised” a lot. Sometimes characters are brought into the story simply as plot devices and then are never seen again, even when it would make total sense for them to return. Sometimes plot points are brought into the story for no reason. Example in the four parter Civil War (Marvel please stop trying to make Civil War happen) in which Black Bolt had a machine that would seal up every inhuman on Earth in order to bring peace between humans and inhumans after they were being controlled by Ultron. He goes to that machine and was about to use it, but Captain America told him not to and rather than turn it off, Black Bolt destroys the machine. That entire plot point was pointless and could’ve been gotten rid of. The pacing in the episodes also tends to be off. Things happen too fast or off scene so things sometimes just come out of nowhere. Sometimes they build something up only to resolve it almost immediately, leaving it feeling unsatisfying. I’ll give them that they don’t leave hanging plot points. They do resolve everything, but the bad pacing causes the endings not to be satisfying. Sometimes the episodes feel like they’re stretching because they resolved one or two plot points too fast and now they have to pad the time be doing the same thing they just did at a different area. Overall, the stories are just bland, not bad, but predictable. The pacing is what really ruins it as things end too early and it makes the episodes feel long.

Better of the two: Honestly, this one is a draw. JLA’s short format and not having continuity can make the show feel repetitive when specific characters show up over and over again and have to go through the same issue over and over again, but those plots are never really bad and they mix it up well each time they do it, so it feels like you’ve seen it before, at the same time it still has the feeling of being fresh. AA’s stories aren’t bad, just uninspired and really badly paced. You know where the story is going and how it’s going to end and you can guess the twist before it ever happens, but they do take care of every loose end and it does keep up with character development and continuity. They both have flaws that could push a lot of people away, but both of pros that could bring them in.

Draw

Art Style

Justice League Action: This is definitely where you can tell the show was made mostly for children. It’s art style is super colorful, very bright and vivid and everything about it pops out, and you know what, it really works. Everything stands out. Everyone looks so unique from their face to their bodies. They did this thing with faces where eye sizes and facial features placements are always slightly different so you can always tell who whom is no matter what. Though I will admit, while it does do different body shapes for many of the characters, a lot of them have the same body shape, normally the villains. The backgrounds are also a bit bland. I know it’s so that the characters pop out more, but at times the backgrounds feel washed out. Overall, I love the art on the characters, but the backgrounds could be better.

Avengers Assemble: Just like the story, the art work here is just bland. The colors are dim and drab. There is very little shading done, the characters almost never deviate in shape or size unless it’s the obvious like a kid character or a Hulk, and even then, the Hulks don’t look that different in body shape, just taller and slightly wider. The backgrounds can look better than the characters, but unless something is happening, it usually isn’t breath taking. Things only got worse in the fourth season. Characters no longer have shading or lighting, so they all look very distilled. The backgrounds have shading and lighting still so now the characters look out of place. At times it’s just really hard to look at.

Winner: JLA

Animation

Winner: JLA

Overall better series

Winner: JLA

#Marvel #DC #Comics #Comic books #Marvel vs DC #DC vs Marvel #animation

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ricardosousalemos · 8 years ago

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Weezer: Weezer (Blue Album)

Weezer mastermind Rivers Cuomo was such a somber kid that his second-grade teacher trained the other students to tell him, in unison, “Let me see the smile.” Childhood in Yogaville, the ashram and Integral Yoga HQ led by “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda in eastern Connecticut, was isolating, devoid of much pop culture and adventure—until Cuomo heard Kiss. When a family friend brought their fifth album, 1976’s Rock and Roll Over, to the Cuomo house, it sent Rivers and younger brother Leaves launching off furniture in a way only formative music can. “I’ve pretty much based my life around that record,” he has said. With their comic-book personas and distorted riffs, Kiss cracked Cuomo’s young brain wide open and rewired it for good. He had little idea what debauchery they were singing of, but from that point on, Cuomo began having intense dreams about becoming a rock star, and he began obsessively studying the work of his songwriting heroes.

For Rivers, music offered both a coat of armor and an identity. As a pre-teen enrolled in public school for the first time, Cuomo went by a different first name and his stepfather’s last name (Kitts); his chosen moniker—Peter Kitts—was awfully close to that of Kiss drummer Peter Criss. And while Cuomo was still picked on as he made his way through puberty, he eventually found his people: the metalheads. In 1989, Cuomo moved from Connecticut with his high school band to Los Angeles, ground zero for the AquaNetted and Spandexed. There, he found himself in the midst of shifting tastes, both culturally and personally. He started working at the Sunset Boulevard Tower Records, where he was schooled on quintessentially “cool” music like the Velvet Underground, Pixies, and Sonic Youth.

Also in the mix at this time was a new band called Nirvana. When Cuomo first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio in late 1991 while washing dishes in an Italian restaurant, he was sorta pissed he didn’t write it himself. “Rivers says, ‘I should have written that,’” remembered early Weezer guitarist Jason Cropper in John D. Luerssen’s band biography, River’s Edge. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah. That’s totally true.’ Because the music he was writing was improving in quality every day.” Cuomo’s interest in Nirvana became an obsession. He’d taken notes from Brian Wilson, the Beatles, Scorpions, Yngwie Malmsteen, and, of course, Kiss. But for all his knowledge of rock history, he still cared deeply about writing anthems that spoke to his generation, even if he had trouble looking his peers in the eyes.

Weezer anthems were destined to be different. In 1994, the acts dominating the modern rock charts were pushing against something, from the British aesthetes (Depeche Mode, New Order, Morrissey) to the singular weirdos (Beck, Tori Amos, Red Hot Chili Peppers) to the disenfranchised youth (Nirvana, Green Day, Pearl Jam). With rebellion came a facade of cool, and that was something Weezer could never manage, at least not in the traditional way. Cuomo always tried a little too hard. He would become the fidgety anti-frontman with a thousand “revenge of the nerds” taglines and a Harvard degree to prove it. That dichotomy—the big-time rockstar in khakis and Buddy Holly glasses, who never seems totally comfortable in his own skin—is what launched his cult and anchored his unlikely sex appeal. And his band—drummer Patrick Wilson, bassist Matt Sharp, and guitarist Brian Bell—played along, accentuating their innate geekiness to make Weezer feel like a unified front.

By the summer of 1993, Cuomo had written a number of songs strong enough to convince the alt-rock major DGC to sign Weezer (this despite a lack of buzz around the L.A. scene) and have the Cars’ frontman Ric Ocasek produce their first album. When the group’s self-titled debut—typically known as The Blue Album—arrived in May 1994, Cobain had been dead for a month. A feeling of dread hung over the alternative rock world whose prominence was ushered in by the Seattle sound. With their wired energy, effortless power-pop-punk hooks, and Beach Boys harmonies, Weezer took the alt-rock explosion in a new direction. You couldn’t quite tell if Cuomo was mocking his song’s regressive narrators or sympathizing with them. But once you got past his defense mechanisms and sorting through the humor and cultural references, you found a portrait of a young man’s psyche, riddled with angst and insecurity. And it arrived on the wings of massive riffs and gnarled guitar solos that sounded like they were emanating from a Flying V—on every single song.

The Blue Album’s exploration of the fragile male ego is in full swing by the record’s second track, “No One Else.” Taken at face value, this is likely the most misogynistic song Weezer has ever released. “I want a girl who will laugh for no one else,” Cuomo sings while the band rushes through the fuzzy pop-punk changes, evoking the hyperbole of masculinity. But there’s more beneath the surface. “‘No One Else’ is about the jealous-obsessive asshole in me freaking out on my girlfriend," Cuomo has said. The song acquires even more resonance in the context of its sequencing on the record. Cuomo described the following song, “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,” as “the same asshole wondering why she's gone.” In actuality, he spends most of “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” muttering to his ex’s wallet photograph and masturbating to her memory, getting in a joke along the way, saying she enjoyed the sex “more than ever.” It’s an absurd scene, but imagine the sentiment coming from the wrong person and it’s suddenly not so funny. Weezer were masterful at walking this line between knowing jokiness and legitimately creepy dysfunction.

This base kind of arrested development shifts back and forth between the narrator’s relationship with girls and his views on himself. If “No One Else” and “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” are mirror twins, so are “Surf Wax America” and “In the Garage.” Given that Weezer were named after a common term for asthma sufferers, no one expected them to be out on a board riding the waves. That tension animates “Surf Wax America,” a well-crafted jumble of harmonic puzzles and barreling punk guitars where the hedonistic surfer lifestyle is both celebrated and chided for its simplistic worldview. Even while the song sneers, the ferocity of Cuomo screaming “Let’s go!” juxtaposed with the solemnness of the band’s Wilsonian harmonies make you believe, once again, in Weezer’s sincerity. Meanwhile, “In the Garage” is an homage to that happy place where no one judges you for your comic books, D&D figurines, and Kiss posters. It seems like over-the-top self-parody, but the garage was indeed a real place where early Weezer practiced and recorded when Cuomo, Sharp, and original guitarist Justin Fisher lived together in the “Amherst House” near Santa Monica. The hopeless ambition of “In the Garage” would make it the defining song of nerd-rock.

In between “Surf Wax America,” a fantasy about someone completely different, and “In the Garage,” a hyper-detailed song about himself, lies a song about his father. There are two more nakedly emotional songs on Blue, which are set off further by Cuomo’s rare embrace of laid-back guitars. Atop a bluesy jangle, “Say It Ain’t So” details the moment when Cuomo’s deepest worries are realized: He sees a beer in the fridge and, remembering how his father drank before he walked out, he senses his stepfather is doing the same. He fears now that he, too, is destined for this fate. Pinkerton, Weezer’s sophomore album, is often described as the tortured confessional to end all tortured confessionals, essentially a diary of Cuomo’s notorious Asian fetish. But “Say It Ain’t So” is just as raw, and arguably has more that its listeners can use, throwing its arms wide open to anyone who’s known the trauma of dad issues. The music is constructed perfectly, building and building until what's left of Cuomo's vulnerability comes out as a bitterly frayed "yeah-yeah," all capped by a guitar solo worthy of the Scorpions.

The desire to write a perfect song can drive some songwriters mad, as their belief in music as a vehicle for emotional expression reconciles itself with the belief that pop is a puzzle that can be solved. On Blue, Cuomo found the ideal balance, as he rarely has since. He understood the rules so well that he also knew when to break them, from Sharp’s super silly new-wave keyboard in “Buddy Holly” to the mumbled dialogue that runs through “Undone” (the band and their friends chatting were a backup plan after DGC refused to clear dialog from an old sci-fi film, “Peanuts,” and more).

The fact that “Only In Dreams” is eight glorious minutes long is Blue’s greatest example of self-indulgence gone right. It confronts the two most perilous teen-boy anxieties—talking to a girl you really like and dancing in public. It’s fiery, gorgeous, well-played, and devastatingly sad. Sharp’s trudging bassline guides the way forward for the narrator, whose fear of stepping on his crush’s toenails is temporarily silenced by the band’s total calamity. Rock’n’roll teaches us that extreme volume can quiet the voices of doubt inside our heads and numb the pain of living inside our awkward bodies. In this sense, the climaxes on “Only in Dreams,” starting around the song’s midpoint, are rock’n’roll lessons of a lifetime. But it’s the big build at the 6:45 mark that plays like a beta male transfiguration. Having re-recorded Cropper’s guitar parts in one take after essentially firing him following Blue’s 1993 recording at Electric Lady, Cuomo ends up axe-battling himself until he’s soloing like the metal gods he grew up worshipping. Wilson’s drumming—an underrated and idiosyncratic force throughout Weezer’s discography—drives home the catharsis. His cymbals crash from every angle and his tricky rolls play like percussive triple axels. By the end of the song, you’re back to reality, exhausted but ready for a fight—even if it’s just against your own doubting voices.

For all the talk about Rivers Cuomo’s anemic masculinity, The Blue Album has a unifying thread of identity that supersedes gender. An essay on the Smiths pointed out that, “Asking people about their interest in the Smiths is another way of asking this question: ‘How did you survive your teenage years?’” The same could be said of Weezer’s debut. Blue quivers with isolation if you look past the pastiche, the deflective humor, and the guitar lines that make you sit up tall. The emotion Weezer tapped into is echoed in music sometimes considered distinctly millennial due to its high levels of anxiety, from Death Cab for Cutie and Carseat Headrest to Mitski’s Puberty 2 and even Drake at his most neurotic.

For as classic as the album is considered now, Blue didn’t make the 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll. Back then, Weezer were considered alt opportunists or even Pavement ripoffs—a comparison that seems silly now, looking at the distinct rock strains since indebted to Cuomo. But MTV and radio airplay for “Buddy Holly” and “Undone — The Sweater Song” made Weezer huge, and The Blue Album went double-platinum within 15 months of its release. Over the next three years, as Weezer 1.0 slowly imploded (bye-bye Matt Sharp, hello rotating door of bassists), the record would sell a million more and be well on its way to canonization. By 2003, Pitchfork named it one of the best records of the 1990s; two years later, Rolling Stone heralded it as the 299th greatest album ever. And so Blue now sits in a sweet spot of commercial accessibility and critical adoration, a combination that guarantees the album will make its way into the hands of a certain kind of bespectacled teenager for decades to come—the ones who really need it. Cuomo never wrote a song as indelible as “Seems Like Teen Spirit,” but he did reach generations of rock kids, proving that coolness is optional if you study hard enough.

#reviews-albums

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eridianshores-blog · 8 years ago

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The Walking Dead: Season 7, Part 1

Warning: There be SPOILERS ahead! If you don’t want the skinny on all the twists, turns, deaths, and surprises in the first half of Season 7, stop reading now!

Ready?

When we last left our motley crew of survivors, Negan and the Saviors thoroughly had them bent the fuck over...and someone got beat to death with a baseball bat (wrapped in barbed wire, though I’m not sure how much difference a few small cuts makes when your aim is to cave in someone’s skull). Honestly I expected Aaron to get it since he was the least main character, though my second guess was Eugene - especially since he seemed to have outlived his usefulness and the fact that he was trying to become more survivor-like. If you pressed me further I probably would’ve gone with Rosita or Sasha just because - narratively speaking - they’ve kinda been dead weight. I even considered Maggie as the possible victim just as a means of wrapping up the whole pregnancy thread without retreading ground we covered with Lori.

Well I was wrong; no surprise there as I’m apparently terrible at predicting events like these.

In what was already a really, really, really drawn out scene from the Season 6 finale, Season 7′s premiere makes it feel even longer. Granted some serious shit goes down, but it kinda feels like the punctuation at the end of a run-on sentence. Anywho, Abraham goes down, and not to be forgotten, tells Negan to “suck my nuts” after the first crushing blow. The second one drops him for good, and Negan turns poor Abrahams head into something resembling a smashed watermelon with a generous dose of red Jell-O.

Shocking, right? I guess. But in my mind Abraham never quite made that leap into the upper echelon of folks like Rick, Daryl, Carol, Carl, Glenn, Maggie, Michonne and maybe a couple of others I’m missing. Whatever import he carried had passed and he was quickly slipping into non-essential territory. His death would’ve had a greater impact back when he was at the forefront - namely on the road to Terminus - but as it is he’d just sort of slipped into the background.

So ol’ Abe is dead, Negan is still fucking talking...now what? Here’s where the real shocker comes. After all, we spent all summer (figuratively speaking in my case) knowing that someone was going down. But when Daryl’s angry lunge is met with the sudden and gratuitous execution of Glenn, well, I think my jaw hit the floor along with everyone else’s. Some criticism was leveled at the scene’s gore / violence / sadism / brutality / whatever you want to call it, but I didn’t bat much of an eye at that sort of stuff. Yeah, I realize a lot of “squares” got into the show and still squirm at the sight of CG brain matter and latex bite wounds, but I’d been watching zombies eat people along with other depraved acts of violence years before TWD hit the scene. If the show wants to push people’s buttons with gore and torture and brutality then by all means, go for it, but stuff like that is neither going to make or break an episode for me. Was it gratuitous and excessive? Probably, though I think some people forget that this is a horror-themed show and not an action-drama (stylistically speaking).

Back to Glenn though...yeah, I think it was a shitty move to kill him off. Was his fake death in episode 3 (ish) supposed to foreshadowing or some shit...? I’ve since read that his death was adapted from the comic book, but as I said in my previous post regarding Season 6, comics and TV are vastly different media and you can’t just transmute one to the other. What may have worked in the comics (I don’t know, I’ve never read them) isn’t necessarily going to play out the same way on screen, especially when the heightened emotional investment of the viewers is concerned.

After this cathartic yet jolting hour and change of television, the following episode introduces us to “The Kingdom,” replete with horses, spears, “armor,” and a fucking guy in an auditorium calling himself a king. With a giant tiger. WTF. Seriously. WTF. (This could well be another case of the comics not lending themselves well to the small screen...)

I wasn’t wild about this largely expository episode, especially as viewed through the Morgan-Carol lens. Some of that was due to their endless and circular conversation which wore on my nerves fast. The show is trying to find a place for Morgan but I don’t think they’ve really figured it out yet (respect for life is cool and interesting and all that, but in a world where it’s kill or be killed, you’ve got to go somewhere with it), and Carol is rapidly becoming a second-rate character due to her seemingly random onset of neurosis. Morgan is torn between the necessity to kill versus one’s ability to change. Has the show even attempted to reconcile that yet? No? Then let’s move the hell on. Oh, and Carol wants to be left alone? Do we really understand why? Is she any closer to telling us? No? Then let’s move the hell on.

Moving on. I promise I’m not going to spend this much time on each episode.

As the show enters its third episode, “The Cell,” it nearly grinds to a halt. What could’ve been a more insightful look into the Saviors, or a more sympathetic portrayal of Dwight, Sherry, and their hardships, or a further character study of Daryl, turned out to be a 10 minute story strung out over an hour. All we do is watch Negan attempt to break Daryl, which doesn’t even work. We basically expect Daryl to endure whatever the Saviors throw at him, and he does. What is so frustrating is that the story doesn’t advance one iota.

And then there’s the fourth episode which really tries my patience. Negan comes to Alexandria, scares the shit out of everyone, and relieves Alexandria of nearly all of its creature comforts and most of its necessities (despite claiming to only want “half”). Negan talks...and talks...and talks...and talks some more, while Rick skitters around with his tail between his legs, eager to prevent any further deaths. It’s a little difficult to watch in one sitting, mostly because every uncomfortable moment is stretched and milked and then absolutely beaten to death...before moving on to the next. It’s like...intense yet stagnant at the same time...I think that’s the best way to describe it.

A quarter way through the season and the ho-hum pace is become obvious. Can we get a true Negan encounter or at least change the status quo within the next 4 episodes...? It’s not looking good.

Episode 5 spends most of its time at the Hilltop, still staunchly refusing to actually advance the plot. Compared to the best of The Walking Dead, this episode is another snooze-fest. Maggie and Sasha and “Jesus” and Gregory go at it some more and blah blah blah. The Saviors bring some zombies over in the middle of the night and it seems the only people in the whole damn settlement capable of doing anything about it are sick, pregnant Maggie and Sasha. Then Negan’s main crony, Simon, comes to town and basically does all the same shit we’ve watched Negan do: talk, threaten, demean, dehumanize, and fucking talk.

What I don’t understand about this episode is Maggie and Sasha’s hard fought battle to stay at the Hilltop. For the life of me (maybe I missed an important line somewhere or something) I can’t figure out how “going to Hilltop to get Maggie a doctor” turned into “Maggie and Sasha live at the Hilltop now,” seemingly indefinitely. I could understand if they wanted to hang back a while while she recovered or got her strength back or whatever, but the flavor of their conversations with Jesus and Gregory seem to plainly indicate that their intention is to remain at Hilltop for the long run. As much as this group has talked about family and helping each other and all that shit, I just can’t understand Maggie and Sasha’s sudden willingness - nay, desire, to remain in Hilltop and leave Alexandria behind, especially without even a word edgewise.

And while we’re on the subject, we’ve got a similar situation going on over at the Kingdom. Back at the beginning of that episode, Morgan mentioned to Carol that they should stay a week or so while she recovers from her 2 gunshots. First of all, Carol recovers remarkably quickly from a bullet to the arm and another to the leg, and we know that large amounts of time aren’t passing because of Negan’s weekly visits to Alexandria - the whole first half of this season seems to occur over the course of about 2 weeks.

Anyway, after throwing enough fits, Morgan escorts Carol to the abandoned house outside of but near the Kingdom. Now then, with Carol obviously capable of caring for herself and Ezekiel looking after her besides, why the fuck doesn’t Morgan promptly return to Alexandria with the news, “hey everyone, there’s this whole other community full of decent people not too far away and they’re receiving regular bitchslaps from the Saviors as well!” I mean not only would this be the decent thing to do as a member of this “familial unit” but it may also prove to be valuable strategic knowledge that could directly impact the safety of its residents. Why the hell is he milling around the Kingdom eating pomegranates and smiling at the sun or what the hell ever? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I get that the writers are trying to set up something, but they can’t just scatter our little group willy nilly and suddenly act like they don’t give a shit about their comrades or if their people have a fucking clue where they are, if they’re alive, dead, whatever. We could at least be given a few lines of dialog as to why they’re not returning to Alexandria. So far this is something that has really really bothered me about the season. It just doesn’t seem like these characters would vanish without a good reason and without letting their group know...it just seems wildly uncharacteristic and like the writers are outright forcing them into these situations without valid reasoning.

Going into episode 6 we’ve got to move forward, at least a little bit, right? RIGHT!? Oh no, wait, there’s that girl...and that dude..who somewhat inexplicably hit the road for 2 weeks in search of supplies. Why Tara and Heath of all people? Why didn’t a more competent fight - and a more seasoned scavenger for that matter - accompany them or hell, go instead? Who knows. It was weird when they mentioned it way back in Season 6 and it still doesn’t make any damn sense. The 2 most elite members of the A-team (Rick and Daryl) go out on a sorghum run, yet the timid Tara who’s spent a large part of the outbreak in a dark apartment and relative newcomer Heath who’s lived in the relative comfort and safety behind Alexandria’s walls up until the past couple of months are the sole members of this 2 week expedition...? Methinks this decision was made with a shrug and out of convenience, and I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is.

We catch up with half of the inept duo, washed up on a beach somewhere. Long story short we’re introduced to the rather odd community of Oceanside...at lest that’s what Wikipedia calls it; as of the mid-season finale, I don’t think it’s been given an official name on the show. Through one contrivance or another, Tara manages to be like, the only stranger ever not to be shot on sight by this community of, strangely enough, nothing but women and girls. (Is it just me or is there something ironic about them (lots o’ women) living at the coast and having an endless supply of fish!?)

I don’t know which was more uninteresting: an episode revolving solely around Tara or this fucking Oceanside establishment. We lost people blah blah, times are hard blah blah, I hope you understand why we can’t trust strangers, blah blah blah fucking blah. It seems purely like Oceanside is a source of cannon fodder for whatever is going to happen with Negan. Far too late into the episode do we finally find out that the Saviors murdered all the men and the remaining survivors fled and established the current settlement. This is of course after they pretended to be cool with releasing Tara and then trying to kill her, something which I’m still not sure I completely understand. Tara is assisted by a sympathetic member of the group who makes her swear not to tell anyone about the community; Tara eventually makes it back to Alexandria only to find out all the horrible news: her girlfriend’s dead, Ford is dead, Glenn is dead, and the camp now inks out a living under the tyrannical rule of Negan. Whoopee. You’d think after all this she would’ve at least confided in someone about Oceanside - maybe not Rosita as she was at the time - but at least someone. Hell, at least she came back.

We also get a snippet into Tara’s 2 week excursion with Heath, which was far less interesting than it should’ve been. Basically they didn’t find shit, found an abandoned camp on a bridge (which by the way was a really cool place / idea for an encampment and I would’ve loved to see more of it), and then - not totally unexpectedly - their novice post-apocalyptic survival skills put them smack in the middle of a zombie attack. And after all that we still have no idea what the hell happened to Heath. I guess he discovered another settlement, haha. No but seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m ok suspending disbelief, really, I am, but I think it’s a little too convenient that within the span of what must be only a couple of weeks our group has suddenly discovered 4 additional settlements. Throughout all their travels from Atlanta to whether they are in Virginia they never ran across anything remotely resembling a permanent settlement or long-term community except for Woodbury, Terminus, and maybe that hospital, though I question how permanent that arrangement really was. More than that though, I can’t understand how the scouts and runners for Alexandria didn’t discover these places, or at least a hint of their existence. And for that matter, how come none of these places discovered Alexandria? We’ve yet to find out if any of these places knew about each other (excluding the Saviors, obviously) but so far there’s no indication that the Hilltop, the Kingdom, or the residents of the former or current Oceanside have any awareness of each other. I’m not questioning the existence of the communities themselves, I just think it’s unlikely for the Alexandrians to encounter 4 of them for the first time in 2(ish) short weeks.

At this point we’ve been diverted every which way - the Hilltop, the Sanctuary, Oceanside...and we really haven’t made much headway going into the penultimate episode of the season’s first half. Episode 7 is still mostly exposition, though we get a semi-insightful glimpse of the world that is the Sanctuary. We’re also treated to one of the most balls-to-the-wall moments of the entire series thus far: Carl mowing down a couple of Negan’s men and 110% ready to keep unloading. Jesus and Carl have both trailed the Saviors back to their home compound, with Jesus choosing to remain hidden while Carl goes into full blown MDK mode.

Carl’s behavior also brings up an interesting point that I alluded to in my Season 6 post concerning Negan’s methods of control. See, the problem with Negan’s brand of cruelty is that he leaves his subjects with nothing left to lose, which in turn will lead to revolts of the most fervent, determined, and bloody kind. It would seem to me that people in the midst of this amount of suffering would be so miserable that losing their lives in service of at least trying to break free would be the way to go. If they die then so what? Negan has made their lives so fearful and meaningless that they truly have nothing left to lose. This is exactly how Carl acts, and why he’s the only one is beyond me, especially after seeing how downtrodden and afraid and broken the residents of the Sanctuary truly are. You can’t sustain a rule with violence and fear for very long. There is only so much pain and suffering that a human will endure before they’re willing to try anything, at any cost, to alleviate this pain. Maybe this is what we’re building up to - Dwight’s looks of dissention certainly seem to suggest something in the ballpark - but even so, Negan seems to have operated for a very long time, leaving me to wonder how he maintained his rule for so long.

Anyway, the episode tries to gradually build tension throughout Carl’s guided tour (with Negan as the tour guide) of the Saviors’ home, though for some reason I never really got the impression that Carl’s life was in any danger. Now what Negan might do to the other Alexandrians, well, that’s another story and certainly something worth dreading, but as far as Carl himself, I felt pretty confident that he’d skate through the encounter somehow.

I will say that despite the episode’s shortcomings, it was a great, nay, fantastic showcase for Carl’s character, a guy who’s been mostly relegated to awkward and confounding encounters with the why-the-hell-are-you-here Enid. Being a young kid at the show’s onset, it was tough to give Carl meaningful arcs or development and he mostly served as a foil for Rick and Lori. As he’s gotten older though, he’s definitely grown into his character a bit more, and never is that more evident than here in “Sing Me a Song.”

We’ve already established his ultimate badassery via the act of fearlessly popping up out of the truck with a fucking machine gun and pulling the trigger without a shred of hesitation, but there’s another great moment up in Negan’s office (or lounge or whatever) where Carl proves he’s got balls big enough for a dumptruck. I don’t remember the dialog verbatim, but at one point he calls Negan’s bluff about hurting him and proclaims that if he was smart he’d kill him and Rick right now. And he’s not just being young and dumb and posturing - he is scared, he is rattled, and he is concerned about the repercussions of his actions, but he’s saying this shit anyway, which is worth about a million points in my book. What will perhaps go down as one of the greatest lines ever uttered throughout the series (along with Abe’s “suck my nuts” mid-execution) is Carl’s vitriol-filled response to Negan’s, “what do you think I should do with you?” to which Carl retorts, “I think you should jump out of that window and save me the trouble of killing you,” delivered with all the venom and hatred that this post-apocalyptic world has to offer. BAM. It don’t get much more badass than that. Daryl, you’ve got some competition. I’m not sure Negan quite takes Carl seriously, but I like to believe I detected the tiniest bit of anxiety in his face...I like to think that at least some small part of him was shaken by Carl’s cold, nigh psychotic suggestion. Ultimately I suspect that Negan will get his comeuppance; I can only hope it’s at the hands of Carl by way of Lucille, and that the event doesn’t scar Carl too much and make him all withdrawn and mopey for a season. I hope he walks away from Negan’s shattered cranium with his head held high, fully aware that his actions will ripple (for the better) across whatever immediate future there is for the area. Ol’ “One-Eyed Carl” will definitely be a bright spot worth paying attention to as the seasons wear on.

Although we do learn a little bit more about the Saviors, particularly that they live under the same oppression as the other communities, if not worse, it’s still just a big ol’ dose of Negan talking and talking and talking and talking. Perhaps most importantly we’re witness to a punishment known as “the iron,” and thereby clued in to the reason behind Dwight’s gruesome disfigurement. I realize that Dwight’s been built up to sort of be Daryl’s nemesis ever since their first encounter, way back in pre-Savior days, but the writers also seem to be setting the stage for Dwight to play a crucial role in the inevitable uprising against Negan. The real suspense in this episode happens as Negan escorts Carl back to Alexandria...but then he just talks and talks and talks some more. It’s not all bad necessarily, there’s just too much time and focus dedicated to how charismatically twisted Negan is. I think it’d be more productive if he let go of his schtick for just a moment and really clue us in to why he is the way he is and what he’s really trying to prove or accomplish beyond being a power-mad sociopath (and maybe that’s all he is).

I mean even back in the days of the Governor, at least he did some good amidst whatever issues he had. He had his dark side and his cronies and Merle on hand to take out the trash, but he wasn’t simply depraved for the sake of being depraved. He built something. And then he actually built something again. There was definitely a piece of his brain dedicated to being a crazy shit, but he also did a lot of what he did because he thought it was the right thing to do and because he was genuinely interested in protecting his people and creating a purposeful life for them. Does Negan actually think he’s building something or accomplishing anything? Was he the product of some other tyrant or has he always been this way? Was he ever the victim? Is there anything or anyone he genuinely cares about? Is there really any purpose behind this rampant acquisition and exploitation beyond his instant gratification? These are all things that would give Negan a lot more depth and make his copious amounts of screen time far more justifiable. Maybe we’ll learn more. I hope so. Right now he’s basically the devil incarnate, and while that may account for some quick thrills, pure evil isn’t all that interesting.

Ok, deep breath, mid-season finale...is this too gonna fizzle out or will we finally be propelled into something other than Negan bitch-dom or some new group of shacks and shanties and another cadre of scared-as-hell survivors? In a nutshell, this is easily the best episode of the season thus far, though that’s not necessarily high praise.

We pick up where the previous episode left off and watch the group splinter even further: Michonne goes out on her own, Spencer ventures out, Rick and Aaron desperately seek supplies for Negan, and Rosita berates Eugene in taking her to the machinist shop to make her a single bullet. It’s kind of a lot to keep up with but ultimately I think the episode reconciles these threads well enough - certainly better than they have in quite a while.

Rick and Aaron provide us with the most interesting sojourn whereby they track down a now-dead survivor’s cache of supplies. The problem? They’re all loaded onto a boat on the other side of the pond...a pond filled with anchored zombies. Lo and behold there’s a boat at the shore...but it’s been riddled with bullet holes. This is tangential and a minor point, but I never understood Rick and Aaron’s approach to using the small boat. Their strategy was to go as fast as possible and hopefully cross the relatively short yet treacherous distance to the larger boat full of supplies. Using pieces of wood they row and do alright until about the halfway point where they’re almost overtaken by zombies, Aaron falls into the water and is nearly killed. What I don’t understand is why didn’t the guy in the rear row slowly and more cautiously while the guy in front killed upcoming zombies and bailed water out in the meantime. At the slow rate that the boat was filling with water, someone continually bailing out water would’ve been able to keep it afloat indefinitely. I mean it doesn’t really matter since they were able to collect the supplies without injury, it just seemed like one of those situations that could’ve been handled much more safely.

Beyond that though, I don’t understand why they didn’t just walk around the pond and get at the boat from the other end. We see the mysterious mis-matched boot man peering from behind, and it’s easy to see that the pond wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to walk around. Regardless, I did kinda like the idea of a boat as a supply cache in the middle of a pond “guarded” by anchored zombies.

Back at home in Alexandria the vibe is as nervous as ever as Negan continues his psychological torment of Carl and Olivia. (I would include Judith, but obviously she’s too young to have any clue what’s going on.) And just then big dick Spencer waltzes on over with some liquor in an obvious attempt to curry favor with Negan. Initially I thought the guy had come around and finally grown a brain and was trying to work some kind of angle, but then he just threw all his cards on the table and basically asks Negan to kill Rick and put him in charge instead. At first Negan seems agreeable, but I knew better. (Finally I had an accurate prediction!) Negan makes 2 excellent points, 1) Rick is the one out there “swallowing his hate” and getting shit done, and 2) if Spencer wants to be in charge so bad, why doesn’t he just kill Rick himself and take charge? Once it was apparent that Negan saw Spencer for who he really was - a coward - we pretty much know what’s going to happen next, though I will say that I didn’t think it’d be so graphic.

So Spencer is dead, but who really gives a shit? You’d think that the death of his brother, then his dad, and then his mother would’ve made him into something more than the naive little flake that he was, but no. I’m not saying I’m glad he died necessarily, but I am glad the writers smartly handled his attempted betrayal via Negan. I’m impressed that the writers actually gave Negan the capacity to see through Spencer’s pandering instead of some weird situation where we have Negan very openly on Rick’s ass and Spencer behind the scenes trying to subvert Rick’s every move. One important thing about this scene is that it shows us that Negan is not a diplomat nor interested in diplomacy. He recognizes Rick’s value as a survivor in this world versus Spencer’s, and chooses this productive enemy over any type of superficial cordiality with Spencer. Good for you, Negan. I guess. Sortta.

Directly following the “Evisceration of Spencer,” Rosita throws all her chickens in her only basket and pulls the trigger. By the magic of television, the bullet strikes Lucille but clearly scares the shit out of Negan. Some random crony is ready to carve up Rosita’s face, but in true Savior fashion, Negan shows people that it isn’t themselves that will suffer for their own actions, rather it is the innocent that will endure the consequences. For whatever reason the lady-thug decides to off Olivia, who joins Denise and Deanna and Noah and Jessie and others as a casualty of background-character-who-we-sort-of-start-getting-to-know-gets-killed syndrome. Oh well. I seriously thought Rosita was going to get the bat since she seems to have outlived her usefulness.

Now what happens next is 1,000,000,000% perplexing: not only does Negan decide to inspect the casing from the spent round, but he also has a keen enough knowledge of guns n’ ammo to detect that the bullet was clandestinely fashioned. This seems extremely far-fetched to me, and I’m not sure I even really understand the point of it other than to kidnap Eugene and show us that Eugene has grown a pair when he admits to making the bullet after Tara falsely confesses...then again, hasn’t the show been intent on updating us on the status of Eugene’s usefulness every 4 or 5 episodes...? Why this? Why now?

I know that the Saviors cleared out Alexandria’s armory and that having a bullet fired at him would be reason to be suspicious, but at the same time, is it really so hard to believe that Rosita managed to find a gun (and a bullet) while scavenging? Is “let me inspect this spent casing” really the first thing that runs through his head after being shot at? When he asks himself where someone got the firearm and the ammo is the first possibility his mind shoots to really, “hmm I bet someone made this damn bullet!” Did someone make the damn gun too? He doesn’t seem all that concerned with where she got the actual gun from. And seriously, how the fuck does he enough to distinguish a homemade bullet? Had we been treated to a scene or two where it was previously established that Negan had some sort of elaborate knowledge of firearms I could swallow the pill a little easier, but no, right out of the clear blue he’s certain that someone made a bullet. Whatever. You get the point. Couldn’t Negan have nabbed Eugene for some other reason? Hell, does he even need a reason?

The most significant moments of “Hearts Still Beating” occur as the episode begins to wind down. Daryl escapes with the aid of Jesus, savagely murdering a scared fat guy who gives us a shred of enlightenment when he pleads, “I’m just tryin’ to get by man, just like you!” Daryl is understandably beyond all appeals of reason from these people (hence the skull-busting) though I did kinda feel bad for the fat fella.

Also of import is Richard’s (one of Ezekiel’s main soldiers, like the Kingdom’s head of security or something) pitch to Carol and Morgan regarding the Saviors. The 2 communities seem to be at odds with each other a lot less than the Saviors’ other subordinate settlements, yet the relationship appears tenuous based on the exchange we saw back in “The Well.” Richard evidently recognizes the volatility of the Saviors and the inevitability that relations will sour and seeks to act proactively despite Ezekiel’s passive and placating nature. He needs warriors behind him, and he needs help in convincing Ezekiel to go to war. Carol goes into full-on bitch-mode without a shred of regard or concern for basically anyone, refusing almost to the point of stubbornness.

Meanwhile, Morgan is so goddamned in love with every scrap of life that he fails to even make any sense, espousing his philosophy to the point of ridiculousness by saying pretentious shit like, “you don’t have to kill them, you just think you have to,” or something of equal flavor and devoid of practical meaning. I don’t quite get it to be honest, and it almost seems like Morgan is of the impression that just because he doesn’t want to kill someone means that they won’t kill him. Or all these other folks he claims to give a shit about. Then as an enraged and dejected Richard departs, Morgan and Carol manage to get into the same tired altercation where Carol just covers her ears and shuts her eyes and shouts, “leave me alone!” until the room is clear. (That doesn’t literally happen, I’m just so sick of it and her one-track mind.) It’s a shame because I really thought the vaguely philosophical banter between Morgan and Carol would lead to some interesting conclusions, but all it’s done is spiral into the same tired and ultimately meaningless cyclical gridlock.

Richard then goes and has a Governor-esque moment in his hidden camper full of what I assume to be off-the-record supplies...not really sure what all that’s about but I’m pulling for him and he’s got the sort of mindset that’ll really jumpstart this played out “Negan will fuck your ass up” storyline. And judging by the previews for the second half of the season he won’t be alone for long. But he’ll probably die before long, since that’s what happens to tertiary characters right about the time you learn their name and they become a recognizable face.

Then there’s the matter of Michonne, who without hardly breaking a sweat learns where the Sanctuary is. And then she kills the bitch that drove her there in straight up cold blood. But she does gain some valuable tactical info about the Saviors, which is a hell of a lot more than anyone else has managed. She comes home to an absolutely shattered version of Rick (the 2 appear to have gotten pretty serious about each other) and somehow, between her almost anti-inspirational speech about the behemoth that is the Saviors and Rick’s crushing psychological dismantling at the hands of Negan, convinces our fearless leader that the time for war has come. The A-team marches up to the Hilltop and lucky for them, Sasha, Maggie, and Jesus have all come to a similar conclusion. Daryl is finally reunited with the group and you know damn well he’s ready to slit the throats of any and every warm body in the Sanctuary. They’ve also got an ally in Richard who’s over in his camper breaking bottles and crying, they just don’t know it yet. At this point it looks like Oceanside wants to do anything but fight, plus no one knows about them save for Tara anyway, though I think it’s apparent that they’ll somehow be drawn into the coming conflict.

And so the halfway point wraps on an inspirational, borderline uplifting note. The promise of action seems inherent, but The Walking Dead has a weird way of putting off honest to goodness action and narrative momentum so I’ll try to temper my expectations. We still don’t know what happened to Heath (do we care...?) and Eugene’s fate is anything but certain (seriously though, how many times can we watch the poor guy oscillate between blubbering weiner and doing something requiring balls...) but otherwise this was a mostly satisfying mid-season finale and a welcome change from the bullshit cliffhangers we’ve become all too accustomed to.

The dead returns on February 12th, and hopefully I’ll be in a position (and remember) to at least catch the encore or encore-encore broadcast. Overall this hasn’t been the best of front-half seasons, though I wouldn’t consider it a failure, just paced a little too oddly for its own good. Maybe instead of devoting an episode to the Kingdom, and then another to Alexandria, and then another to Hilltop, and then another to Oceanside, TWD could take 2 or 3 of them an alternate between storylines in a single episode - shows do it all the time. We get a segment of Alexandria, cut to commercial, come back to Oceanside, and so on. I feel like this would do a lot to alleviate the choppy, disconnected feeling of the series at this point, and it would also provide some padding for plot threads like those of Oceanside (the episode “Swear”) where we don’t really have a strong lead to adequately carry the show. As an example, regardless of what you think of Alana Masterson’s acting abilities, it’s just plain fact that Tara doesn’t have enough of an emotional rapport with the audience to carry her own episode. Conversely, Morgan and Carol are certainly able to do just that, yet fail to (back in “The Well”) because of how the episode is written. The limitations of TV actually become more apparent when the show hedges all its bets like this, and I sincerely hope that this doesn’t happen again. They did the same shit back in Season 4 with the journey to Terminus; it was frustrating to watch then and it’s frustrating to watch now.

I liken it to different subjects in school. In a given 6-ish hour day you go to something like 4 to 6 different classes...stuff like math, English, history, science, music, art, and so on. What if Mondays were all about math. You get to school and for 6 straight hours you’re bombarded with nothing but math. Then comes Tuesday and you’ve gotta study history for 6 hours, and so on. Now if you really love math, Mondays are going to be fucking awesome for you. But if you absolutely abhor history, Tuesdays are going to be one long ass unforgiving hell. The alternative? Why not study each subject for an hour every day? Every morning you’ve got an hour of math, and then an hour of science, and then an hour of history, etc. Sure, you only get to study what you love for an hour of a day, but a) at least you get a little bit of what you really enjoy everyday instead of once a week, and b) that history class that you really can’t stand only lasts an hour. No matter how bad it is, you’re only 59 minutes away from reprieve, which I think we can all agree is a hell of a lot better than 359 minutes.

There’s another advantage to smaller daily doses as well. If you’re doing English and only English on Wednesdays, you may cover a lot of ground, but how much of that is going to stick from then all the way until the following Wednesday? Not only are you dealing with whatever volume of material that can be stuffed into 6 hours, you’ve got to retain this massive block of information for 7 days and in the midst of 6-hour chunks of all sorts of other information! See what I’m saying? Now if you approach it the other way, you’ve got a lot less information to hang on to and a lot less time that you’re forced to retain it.

In case my point wasn’t crystal clear by now, I’m saying that devoting entire episodes to a single thread is detrimental to the viewing experience and may actually hurt one’s view of the show. If, for example, you really just can’t get behind and identify with Tara’s character, then the entire episode of “Swear” is going to be a complete and utter bust for you. It’s also a jolt to be forced to re-acclimate to a different setting every episode too. “Ok, so we’re back in Alexandria...wait, what happened last time? Is so-and-so still here? Does so-and-so know that such-and-such happened?” It can be tough to recall the finer details and plot points of past episodes, especially considering that, if you watch it as it airs, it may be 3 or 4 weeks between appearances by a certain character. So c’mon folks, delegate these stories properly between episodes; if you ask me, this whole method of singularly focusing on a single situation per episode is kinda...well...lazy.

Finally, the other aspect that’s held this half-a-season back is the lack of emotional depth and/or character development regarding our Big Bad. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again (and so have others): Negan’s endless chatter gets fucking boring. “Less is more” would’ve been an appropriate philosophy when approaching the portrayal of Negan. His peculiar brand of jovial ruthlessness would make much more of an impression if his monologues were used sporadically and to punctuate certain events rather than outright carry them. The simple fact is that Negan is a victim of over-exposure. Now were he an actual person this wouldn’t be so bad, because ideally all this time we spend with him would reveal multiple layers to his personality. But we never really get to this point. I also said earlier that Negan is little more than evil for the sake of evil, and while disturbing, it still gets old because all we really see is that he’s doing awful shit because he enjoys doing awful shit and will continue to do so. He is a very static character in all regards and I feel like this is/was a grievous error committed by the writers.

It is possible that the latter half of Season 7 can help make up for the lackluster experience of wading through the former half, but we’ll have to see some damn crafty work. There ain’t room for more than 1 or 2 duds...no more of these hard breaks between threads and lots more advancement of the plot, whatever that may be. One critic remarked that this first half was like “laying out all the pieces on the new chessboard” and that we “finally got to moving some of them around” going into the 7th episode “Sing Me a Song.” This is a pretty accurate metaphor (if not a tad euphemistic) for what we’ve seen thus far, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this is a chess match worth watching.

#the walking dead #walking dead #walking dead season 7 #the walking dead season 7 #walking dead negan #walking dead saviors #walking dead hilltop #walking dead alexandria #walking dead oceanside #walking dead kingdom #walking dead sanctuary #walking dead carl

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